OK… so I said before Silver Lining is for collaborators not users. And that’s still true… it’s not a polished experience where you can confidently ignore the innards of the tool. But it does stuff, and it works, and you can use it. So… I encourage some more of you to do so.
Now would be a perfectly good time, for instance, to port an application you use to the system. Almost all Python applications should be portable. The requirements are fairly simple:
- The application needs a WSGI interface.
- It needs to be Python 2.6 compatible.
- Any libraries that aren’t pure-Python need to be available as deb packages in some form.
- Any persistence needs to be provided as a service; if the appropriate service isn’t already available you may need to write some code.
Also PHP applications should work (though you may encounter more rough edges), with these constraints:
- No .htaccess files, so you have to implement any URL rewriting in PHP (e.g., for WordPress).
- Source code is not writable, so self-installers that write files won’t work. (Self-installing plugins might be workable, but that hasn’t been worked out yet.)
- And the same constraints for services.
So… take an application, give it a try, and tell me what you encounter.
Also I’d love to get feedback and ideas from people with more sysadmin background, or who know Ubuntu/Debian tricks. For instance, I’d like to handle some of the questions packages ask about on installation (right now they are all left as defaults, not always the right answer). I imagine there’s some non-interactive way to handle those questions but I haven’t been able to find it.
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I believe you want to google for “debconf preseeding”.
Or ‘debconf noninteractive frontend’
We indeed need more people. I have been putting some work on this but for now it’s a hobby :)
Preseeding looks like it’ll do most of the work, so is the obvious way to go but people might need something custom [1] – in which case the recommended way appear to be to bind debconf data to DEBCONFDBOVERRIDE, e.g. by punting up a debconf file to the remote and then binding a reference:
where the debconf file content follows this format:
[1] I needed to feed postfix on karmic with necessary choices in order to get it to run.
BTW, I wrote up my recent experience of using Silver Lining to create cloud-resident Pylons apps using customised Pylons templates – http://bel-epa.com/posts/shabti-silver-cloud.xml
Where can I get a copy of Silver Lining?