Introducing our new blog team

[Florian Snow]

Hi Daniel,


Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.pro> writes:

> Can you comment on what this means from a technical perspective?
> Does autonomy mean that volunteers will be able to pick any
> arbitrary version of an application and start running it on FSFE
> hardware?

Let me try to answer that for the blogs: We have not discussed the
details here, so what I say might not be the final solution.  The
current plan is to keep the blogs on FSFE hardware and also have the
operating system maintained by system hackers.  That simplifies
maintenance overall.  If an OS update breaks the application running
on top of it, that's the team's problem.  That way, system hackers do
not have an additional burden and the service team can take care of
the application itself.

I see the appropriate solution as a mixture of the two scenarios you
have at Debian:  The service runs on FSFE maintained servers, but if
anything, the FSFE only makes sure those servers run.  If the service
breaks, it's not the FSFE's problem.  So no guarantee of availability
for the server at all.


> ensuring all the software and dependencies are properly packaged

Right now, the blogs run on Wordpress.  It is fairly straightforward
to install (and update within the same major version).  Packaging
newer versions of Wordpress would create a lot of additional work and
would cause a delay in rolling out possibly important updates.
Wordpress is also pretty isolated, so I think decent documentation of
how it was set up should be sufficient here.  But the team is still
forming, so we need to still discuss it.  So far, that's just my
opinion.


> I often come across people who insist that they have to run the
> latest version of something from Git, […]

I agree that that is a bad idea.  I see the blogs as a service that is
relatively small and we can figure out how things work best here and
use that experience if and when further services run by sustaining
members are set up.  Ideally, I want to move away from Wordpress, but
that is not a goal we will be able to achieve immediately.  If we can
come up with a good static solution, that will reduce depencies on
external packages and simplify the setup further.

To sum this up a bit:  I think you're making valid points and I will
keep them in mind.  For more complex setups, packaging might be
useful.  In this particular case, I think it's not necessary, but we
will have to see what the rest of the team thinks.

Happy hacking!
Florian