Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Silver Lining: More People!

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:

  1. The application needs a WSGI interface.
  2. It needs to be Python 2.6 compatible.
  3. Any libraries that aren’t pure-Python need to be available as deb packages in some form.
  4. 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:

  1. No .htaccess files, so you have to implement any URL rewriting in PHP (e.g., for WordPress).
  2. 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.)
  3. 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.


Hello! Did you know I'm looking for a job? I am! I really like working with LLMs, especially in the domain of education, wellness, and executive function. Maybe drop me an email?
This is the personal site of Ian Bicking. The opinions expressed here are my own.