[ckan-dev] Debian packaging of ckanclient and datapkg

Thu Jun 23 16:00:30 UTC 2011

Apologies for the delay -- travelling has made net access intermittent.

2011/6/20 J. Félix Ontañón <fontanon at emergya.es>:
> 2011/6/19 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
>> 2011/6/19 J. Félix Ontañón <fontanon at emergya.es>:
[...]
>> 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?

Basically: yes -- but I can imagine DataDeck doing more. I've started
a wiki page for us to gather thoughts:

<http://wiki.ckan.net/DataDeck>

Please dive in ...

> 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

Right, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I was just thinking a webapp
that runs locally makes a lot of sense (why distinguish between
desktop and web ...) -- plus I know zero desktop app programming :-)

> I've made pair of mockups representing the idea behind datapkgUI:
>
> http://twitpic.com/5eh1v2

Really useful. I've added this to the wiki page.

>>> 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.

That's fantastic. James Gardner in cc has done the core of the
packaging work and I think he's just finished a big improvement and
would love to have help going forward. By the way can you participate
(virtually) in one of CKAN sprint days next week (Mon-Wed):

<http://wiki.ckan.net/Sprint_OKCon_2011>

>>> 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?

Yes and if at all possible CKAN core (but as you say may be easier to
start with simpler items).

Rufus