[ckan-dev] Debian packaging of ckanclient and datapkg

[J. Félix Ontañón]

2011/6/19 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> 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.

Yes, absolutely!

> 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 the final idea behind ckanjs/datadeck is to provide a web UI for
doing the same operations you can do with datapkg, am I wrong?

Althoug ckanjs/datadeck approx. sounds multi-platform friendly, first
thing coming to my mind was pure a desktop UI. Thinking, for example,
about the software deployment chain in Ubuntu: debian-repository ->
apt -> ubuntu software center, with data may be: ckan -> ckanclient ->
datapkgUI

I've made pair of mockups representing the idea behind datapkgUI:

http://twitpic.com/5eh1v2

>> 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 :-)

Great! I didn't know packaging work were on the ckan roadmap/interest!
I'll check and tell you. Of course it would be a pleasure to help with
CKAN packaging.

>
>> 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.

Ubuntu 11.04 version of datapkg/ckanclient has been correctly built
into this PPA few hours ago. The PPA is ready for testing with 11.04 and 10.10

>> 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!

I think a first step might be promoting into Debian/Ubuntu
python-ckanclient and datapkg (both easy to package and probably easy
to be accepted). Do you agree?

Cheers!

> Regards
>
> Rufus
>
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