Using something better than Gobby for session notes at UDS

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 4:32 PM, James Troup <james.troup at canonical.com> wrote:
> I appreciate the frustration people have with gobby and I'd be happy to
> run something better if that's what you guys want to do - the only thing
> I'd ask is that someone package Etherpad first[1].

Hi James,

I started with some source packages for Etherpad 1.1 I found here:
 * http://apt.etherpad.org/dists/all/source/

I made a few minor modifications:
 1) used openjdk instead of sun java
 2) ported the most important subset of the (broken) init script to (a
working) upstart configuration
 3) updated debian/control and debian/rules accordingly

With that, I've pushed it to ppa:etherpad/ppa:
 * https://launchpad.net/~etherpad/+archive/ppa/+packages

This package is now apt-get installable on Natty.  You have to answer
a few debconf questions, setting passwords for mysql and etherpad,
etc.  There's certainly room for improvement there, but a few seconds
later, I was able to use an Etherpad instance running on
http://localhost:9000.

Now I'm not necessarily volunteering to be the Etherpad maintainer for
now and evermore, but perhaps some of the people here who are vocally
opposed to Gobby might step up and help with the packaging?

It suffers from most the usual ailments endemic to large Java packages
in Debian/Ubuntu.  The debconf could use a little bit of love.  And
obviously the change from sunjdk -> openjdk needs a bit of testing.  I
can do a complete review of the packaging as an Archive Admin and
publish my notes, if we want to consider it for inclusion in Universe
for Oneiric, but I haven't done so thus far.

Perhaps Jorge/Daniel could get an instance running in a beefy Amazon
EC2 instance (m2.4xlarge with 64GB of memory?) and drum up an
Etherpad-testing-day ASAP with your requisite 100+ concurrent
sessions.  I suspect some configuration tweaks will be necessary,
which should perhaps be folded back into the packaging itself.

James, is this a reasonable starting point?  And is there anyone out
there on ubuntu-devel@ who feels strongly enough about Etherpad/Gobby
to pick up this packaging/testing and take it from here?

-- 
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Core Developer