<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 07:12, Alon Swartz <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alon@turnkeylinux.org">alon@turnkeylinux.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> <div class="im">Soren Hansen wrote:<br> > On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 06:33:22PM +0200, Alon Swartz wrote:<br> >> TurnKey Linux has created 40 Ubuntu-based appliances so far and has<br> >> many more in the works.<br> ><br> > The list certainly looks very impressive. Good job!<br> ><br> >> Our approach to appliance development is a bit different then those<br> >> that have been discussed in the mailing list so far. We are strong<br> >> believers in keeping everything as simple as possible. KISS and all<br> >> that. Debian packages were never really designed for this sort of<br> >> thing and trying to force them into that role raises the bar by making<br> >> things overly complicated.<br> ><br> > Could you elaborate on this a little bit? Lots of different ideas have<br> > been tossed back and forth on various mailing lists, IRC and other fora,<br> > so I'm not completely sure what you mean Debian packages were not<br> > designed for.<br> <br> </div>What this means is that Debian packages were never designed for<br> system-level integration. They're meant to be building blocks for a<br> system administrator who then glues them together to integrate a<br> production solution. An appliance is all about removing that last step.<br> We're not competing with or displacing packages. We're just gluing them<br> together to give the user a better starting point. The means selecting<br> the components, configuring / integrating them to work together to<br> provide the desired solution, and last but not least, testing the final<br> result as a single unit.<br> <br> There's no elegant way to do that with packages / meta-packages<br> precisely because they're not designed for this sort of thing. For<br> example, according to the Debian Policy Manual a package is not allowed<br> to edit configuration files of other packages.</blockquote></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Just wondering: in a way, it seems to me that a pre-packaged VM is much closer to a custom distro than to a package. Sort of. Would it be possible to include a few pre-packaged appliances as options in the standard CD installer?<div> <br></div><div>On the other hand, out of curiosity... In my opinion, it seems to be relatively simple to build a meta-package that would just state all dependencies, and put all customization/editing in a external script that would then collect all information needed and customize the init scripts. What is the problem with this approach?<div> <br></div><div>I'm just asking because I think that a good solution for appliance deployment and customization would be a terrific application for Ubuntu server. I would gladly use it for my own projects. In fact, I'm already an user of other solutions (Bitnami and Jumpbox) that follow a completely different approach. A more "native" approach would be much better.<br> <div><br></div><div>Thanks and keep up with the great work,</div><div><br>-- <br>Carlos Ribeiro<br>Consultoria em Projetos<br>twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/carribeiro">http://twitter.com/carribeiro</a><br>blog: <a href="http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com">http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com</a><br> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@gmail.com">carribeiro@gmail.com</a><br> </div></div></div>