Promoting Debian GNU/Linux in Mozilla Communities

Intro to Debian

Measures to increase adoption

Events

Debian Packaging support for Open Web Apps

Description: Debian packaging for JS libraries that will help get many apps like NextCloud to be part of Debian repository.

Example: Start with packaging a simple nodejs module like pretty-ms.

Event Flow:

1. Intro to Free Software and Open Web
2. Intro to Debian and packaging
3. Problems of having no debian packages for JS libraries
4. How can we help?

Metrics:

Quantitative: Complete packaging of 1-3 node modules. New users of Debian Number of packages installed Qualitative: Bring more Free Software/Open Web apps to Debian Be part of larger Free Software community and Open Web Activists Understand how debian packages are built, understand debian release process.

Background:

Debian provides a consistent interface to installing and managing software written in many different languages. This makes barrier for installing new software very low for users. But many of the important web based Free Software like NextCloud are not available as debian packages. There are many reasons for this.

1. Most web based applications have fast-paced development models. Debian approach is providing security updates for a longer time. Firefox vs Firefox ESR approach is a good example. Firefox is not suitable to be released in debian stable, but Firefox ESR can be supported. We need to provide ESR/LTS like support for applications for this to be viable for debian packages. This needs more involvement and support from upstream developers. If they are not receptive, we should try to find more people who can contribute to this goal of providing long term support.

2. Many language communities (especially nodejs), promotes nano modules, this is taking modularity to extreme extends. This means we have to maintain a large number of debian packages. Recently we have started to embed some modules which may be needed for only a single applications inside the same application. We need more people to maintain these large number of packages.

3. We need to package important tools like rollup, webpack, babel, ava that are required to build many modules from source.

Reproducible builds: When we can verify a binary package is built from the source code provided, we call it reproducible. This ensures the binary is not tampered with and an important part of providing secure apps. Debian is in the process of making all of its packages reproducible.