[ckan-dev] Debian packaging of ckanclient and datapkg

[Rufus Pollock]

2011/6/19 J. Félix Ontañón <fontanon at emergya.es>:
> Hi everybody!
>
> I'm J. Félix Ontañón, from Spain. Since I discovered CKAN i've been
> figuring out the advantages (if any) of working with CKAN from the
> desktop. Though datapkg it's a great tool I wonder whether a GUI could
> help increasing the number of users.

I think it would be *really* useful. One of our key realizations
(perhaps obvious in retrospect) is that data wranglers (and users of
CKAN) are different from coders and while someone know and like the
command line the majority don't.

I've already been doing a bit of personal work on this. First there's
the work with ckanjs (js library for ckan) to develop what I call the
'DataDeck':

<http://dev.okfn.org/ckanjs/app/>

Source code: <https://github.com/okfn/ckanjs> or
<http://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanjs>

This gives a pure js interface to CKAN and runs out of a single html
file so deployment locally is trivial. The issue is this doesn't have
a way to actually get stuff on to your local machine. We could fix
this in various ways -- you probably have better ideas than me --
including have a minimal python 'server' app that you run locally
which can deal with access to local file system. I sketch some more
along these lines in a notebook post.

<http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/05/20/thoughts-on-local-ckan-and-the-datadeck/>

> So, I thought a nice first step, for Linux users, should be to push
> datapkg into most common distros repositories.
>
> I've built a debian source packages for ckanclient and datapkg,
> development versions, under a forked mercurial repo of both
> okfn/datapkg and okfn/ckanclient:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/fontanon/ckanclient-packaging
> https://bitbucket.org/fontanon/datapkg-packaging

This is great! I also note we have been working for last couple of
months on getting a good debian/ubuntu package of CKAN itself:

<http://wiki.ckan.net/Install_CKAN>
<https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckan-debs-public>

We'd love to have assistance going forward maintaining these :-)

> In order to make easier for testers, I'm building the releases
> ckanclient-0.7 and datapkg-0.8 for Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04 under
> a Launchpad PPA repository (It will take yet some time for the Ubuntu
> binary packages to be available):
>
> https://launchpad.net/~fontanon/+archive/ckanutils/+packages

We'll try these out.

> If the packages worked quite well and you thought pushing
> ckanclient/datapkg into debian/ubuntu it's a good idea, I would speak
> with some debian developers / Ubuntu MOTU.

That would be amazing! This is really appreciated and really useful!

Regards

Rufus