Comments about the Debian packaging of Hobbit

[Christian Perrier]

Henrik,

I'm in the process of installing Hobbit (besides a working BB install,
on a Debian sarge server) and I decided to do this with the Debian
packages you have built.

My intent, indeed, is getting Hobbit in the official Debian
distribution by finding a Debian developer wanting to maintain it, or
sponsor uploads for you.

Even if I'm am a Debian developer myself (bubulle at debian.org), I can't
really manage to take this over...at least at the moment.

As I'm am installing the software, let's make comments about what I
find in the Debian packaging which could be "improved".

(indeed, this is mostly nitpicking...)

Debconf templates
-----------------

Make them translatable. Some rewrite below to follow the Debconf
Templates Style Guide we apply in Debian (I'm the author if it..:-)))

This needs using dh_installdebconf in debian/rules, which is
recommended anyway.

Template: hobbit/BBSERVERHOSTNAME
Type: string
Default: localhost
_Description: Hobbit server hostname:
 Please enter the hostname of the Hobbit server.  This is usually
 the fully-qualified DNS name for this host.  It should
 be resolvable via DNS, or you may run into problems
 with your network tests.

Template: hobbit/BBSERVERIP
Type: string
Default: 127.0.0.1
_Description: IP address of the Hobbit server:
 Please enter the IP address which clients will use to access your
 Hobbit server.

Template: hobbit/BBSERVERWWWNAME
Type: string
Default: localhost
_Description: Hobbit webserver hostname:
 Webservers sometimes use a different hostname than the name
 of the server they are running on - e.g. www.sample.com
 is the web hostname, but the server might be known as
 web01.sample.com.
 .
 Please enter the host name used to contact the web interface of the
 Hobbit server.

PID file location
-----------------

Can't be in /var/log. should be in /var/run/hobbit

Conffiles:
----------

 /var/lib/hobbit/www/menu/menu_items.js 
 /var/lib/hobbit/www/menu/menu_tpl.js 
 /var/lib/hobbit/www/menu/menu.css 

Should be moved in /etc by some mean....

Ext scripts
-----------

Currently, adding custom ext scripts requires putting them in
/usr/lib/hobbit/server/ext

This slightly does against Debian Policy where the /usr directory
is aimed at hosting files coming from Debian packages, but no locally
modified files.

The logical place for these extensions seems to be
/usr/local/lib/hobbit/ext or something similar.

I would here recommend adding the option for hobbit to look in
more than one directory for extension scripts. This would allow future
"plugin" packages for some Hobbit extension scripts to put their files
in /usr/lib/hobbit/server/ext while the local admin still have the
opportunity to use theirs in /usr/local.

Apache config
-------------

The example file could be put as "hobbit" in
/etc/apache/conf.d. However, this may need to check the specific
policy for apache-dependent apps


More to come.... Do you have the diff.gz file available somewhere ?


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