Introducing our new blog team

[Daniel Pocock]

On 18/05/16 18:14, Florian Snow wrote:
> 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 available in Debian, would the packages be suitable for
you? The versions are here:

https://packages.qa.debian.org/w/wordpress.html

jessie-backports has 4.5.2

If something is in Debian then any important updates should be supported
by the security team, they are usually quite fast.

> 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.
> 



I had several sites running on Drupal myself but I found that it becomes
tedious dealing with PHP security bugs and such things on a regular
basis.  Database upgrades require some care and all of these systems
have performance constraints, especially if you get slashdotted.
Consequently, I moved many of the sites to a simple static hosting
solution using Bootstrap and jekyll

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll
https://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jekyll.html

Jekyll transforms Markdown into HTML.  The Markdown files can be stored
in Git.

Regards,

Daniel