{"id":479,"date":"2010-07-06T14:58:19","date_gmt":"2010-07-06T13:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.streppone.it\/cosimo\/blog\/2010\/07\/debpan-a-production-grade-debian-cpan-repository\/"},"modified":"2010-07-06T14:58:19","modified_gmt":"2010-07-06T13:58:19","slug":"debpan-a-production-grade-debian-cpan-repository","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.streppone.it\/cosimo\/blog\/2010\/07\/debpan-a-production-grade-debian-cpan-repository\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;DebPAN&#8221;, a production-grade Debian CPAN repository"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>The problem<\/h3>\n<p>This is a proposal I came up with after talking to Gabor Szabo about his <a href=\"http:\/\/szabgab.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/1277832894.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">Perl Ecosystem Development proposal<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One of the major &quot;problems&quot; we face while developing and deploying production Perl-based systems with Debian is that <b>the state of the Debian CPAN modules is depressingly outdated<\/b>. As an example, we&#39;re <b>using Catalyst in Lenny<\/b>, and that dates back to 2008 for the most parts.<\/p>\n<p>This is just not enough.<\/p>\n<h3>A solution: maintain your own APT repository<\/h3>\n<p>Our current solution is to manually package every bit and maintain our own internal Opera APT repository that our servers and applications depend on. That&#39;s not optimal for two reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>we have to package lots of modules, due to interdependencies, dedicating a fair amount of time to this activity that is not exactly &quot;productive&quot;\n<\/li>\n<li>we can&#39;t trust our systems to be Debian anymore, since we&#39;re updating bits and pieces <b>with the bold assumption<\/b> that everything will work fine\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, 99.999% will work fine, since it&#39;s Perl, but the problem is that one day this could fall down on our heads.<\/p>\n<p>So, given the problem, what are the solutions?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Continuing to manually keep an apt repository. Downside: Some(tm) waste of time<\/li>\n<li>Use a different packaging\/deployment system, like <a href=\"http:\/\/search.cpan.org\/dist\/PAR-Repository\" rel=\"nofollow\">PAR::Repository<\/a>. I would personally like this, but it doesn&#39;t eliminate the need to maintain an own repository. You just don&#39;t use <code>dh-make-perl<\/code> and friends, that are, IMHO, nice to have and useful<\/li>\n<li>The <b>&quot;DebPAN&quot;<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The DebPAN<\/h3>\n<p>I know <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/miahfost\/the-gory-details-of-debian-packages-presentation\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jeremiah Foster<\/a>, and at a couple of Perl events I heard him talking to other CPAN\/Perl developers about these issues. His answer would probably be to file a request for packaging for the modules we&#39;re interested in.<\/p>\n<p>The reason why that doesn&#39;t work is that <b>the lead time for a given RFP to land on Debian stable is unacceptably long<\/b>, and I realize that is for a good reason. After all, it&#39;s supposed to be stable, right?<\/p>\n<p>What about a <i>&quot;DebPAN&quot;<\/i> repository?<\/p>\n<p>That could be <b>a 3rd party APT repository<\/b>, something like <code>debpan.perl.org<\/code>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>maintained by a close group of Perl\/Debian\/CPAN developers<\/li>\n<li>guaranteed to have a selection of the most important modules (more on that&#8230;) in a reasonably recent version<\/li>\n<li>targeted to Debian stable, and maybe other distributions? I think Ubuntu 10.04 suffers from this same problem, but much less than Debian Lenny, just to pick two versions<\/li>\n<li>maybe even with patches applied?, but that might be way too much, actually<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The can of worms<\/h3>\n<p>Of course, lots of problems can arise. However, if we think this is a good idea, then we should try to have something even minimal up and running. Then we&#39;ll worry about all the problems&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>However, who gets to decide the most useful modules? That should go by popular demand I guess. Even looking at Debian requests for packaging stats, maybe? I can also imagine that bigger companies using Perl would be interested in this <b>to potentially save lots of &quot;infrastructural work&quot;<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#39;d be really interesting to know other people opinions on this, especially if they use Debian stable, Debian developers, or <a href=\"http:\/\/pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">the Debian-Perl group<\/a> itself.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The problem This is a proposal I came up with after talking to Gabor Szabo about his Perl Ecosystem Development proposal. One of the major &quot;problems&quot; we face while developing and deploying production Perl-based systems with Debian is that the state of the Debian CPAN modules is depressingly outdated. As an example, we&#39;re using Catalyst [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,248,406,91,50,405],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;DebPAN&quot;, a production-grade Debian CPAN repository - Random hacking<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.streppone.it\/cosimo\/blog\/2010\/07\/debpan-a-production-grade-debian-cpan-repository\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;DebPAN&quot;, a production-grade Debian CPAN repository - Random hacking\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The problem This is a proposal I came up with after talking to Gabor Szabo about his Perl Ecosystem Development proposal. 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