Using something better than Gobby for session notes at UDS

[Thierry Carrez]

Dustin Kirkland wrote:
> 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].
> 
> 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

Having discussed that issue with him in the past, I think James doesn't
just want "binary packages", he wants "packages fully built from source
that could end up in the main archive".

The "source" packages at etherpad.org use prebuilt binary blobs in
traditional Java fashion (see under etherpad/lib). Packaging them in a
Debian policy compliant way is a bit more work, like JamesPage can tell
from repackaging Hudson :) So the reason why this wasn't done yet is
because it's non-trivial and time-consuming, not because of laziness.

> 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.

FWIW the OpenStack design summit will use Etherpad with ~400 attendees,
I'll let you know if it breaks :)

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Ubuntu core developer