TurnKey Linux's take on Ubuntu appliance development: KISS

[Soren Hansen]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 06:33:22PM +0200, Alon Swartz wrote:
> TurnKey Linux has created 40 Ubuntu-based appliances so far and has
> many more in the works. 

The list certainly looks very impressive. Good job!

> Our approach to appliance development is a bit different then those
> that have been discussed in the mailing list so far. We are strong
> believers in keeping everything as simple as possible. KISS and all
> that. Debian packages were never really designed for this sort of
> thing and trying to force them into that role raises the bar by making
> things overly complicated.

Could you elaborate on this a little bit? Lots of different ideas have
been tossed back and forth on various mailing lists, IRC and other fora,
so I'm not completely sure what you mean Debian packages were not
designed for.

> Incidentally, we've given some thought to getting the community more
> involved with appliance development and recently released TKLPatch, a
> simple way to customize and extend any appliance in the TurnKey Linux
> virtual appliance library. However the mechanism is really extremely
> simple and the approach (or something like it) should work for
> non-TurnKey appliances.
> 
> Documentation: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/tklpatch
> Source code: http://github.com/turnkeylinux/tklpatch

This is an interesting approach. However, we've traditionally been very
careful about keeping any logic about and customisations for packages
inside the packages themselves, rather than allowing external programs
go in and make changes to the contents and behaviour of packages.

Can you give a few examples of things you've patched this way and why
those changes were needed?  That way, it's easier to discuss how it
perhaps could be done using different mechanics.

> BTW, we're building out TurnKey Linux as a specialized extension of
> the Ubuntu community that focuses on appliance development. Some
> people confuse the project for a fork, but if you take a look at an
> appliance under the hood you'll see it is pretty much a standard
> installation of Ubuntu that has been customized for a particular usage
> scenario. We just give users a better starting point. Like Ubuntu,
> TurnKey Linux is 100% open source.

I would love to see more convergence of the two projects, both in terms
of development efforts, branding, release cycle, release processes, etc.

> Anyhow, we've invested a ton of effort into figuring out all of the
> issues and we'd like to invite any one interested in appliance
> development to collaborate with us. Reinventing the wheel is such a
> poor use of the community's resources.

I agree, you guys clearly have thought a lot of these things through
already, and it would be silly not to leverage your expertise. If we, in
return, could help you guys utilise some of the more traditional methods
for customising applications and applying patches of various sort, that
would be a big win for both sides, I think.

-- 
Soren Hansen                 | 
Lead virtualisation engineer | Ubuntu Server Team
Canonical Ltd.               | http://www.ubuntu.com/
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