At the outset, please accept my deepest thanks for making ‘The Debian Administrator’s Handbook’ available as a free download under the terms of the Freexian SARL license.

In addition, I apologize for being unable to donate to the book campaign, but my financial straits are literally dire, because of chronically declining health accompanied by constantly increasing back and neck pain (plus migraine headaches).

I have been designing, developing, and publishing Web sites — focusing on nonprofit and educational organizations as my main client base — since 1993 (the transitional period during which I was also setting up Gopher servers and content, as well as Web sites) and Debian GNU/Linux has been, and remains, my platform of choice for desktops, laptops, embedded devices, and servers for over thirteen years.

I am very interested, Raphaël — and Roland, in volunteering for the Debian Handbook campaign beyond writing deservedly-positive review and translating (although I pray and hope that the status of my health and finances will enable me to donate financially to the book campaign…and soon rather than later).

On 14 March 2013, Raphaël, you stated (justifiably) that “I’m not so convinced that web developers will find packaging very appealing… they are so used to embed and duplicated libraries in every project, I doubt they’d be thrilled to have to manage proper dependencies instead (with the implication on the testing that it requires).”

As a Web developer and designer (and Debian hacker who has created Debian packages for personal use and self-education) — and because the Debian Project provides excellent tools such as Lintian — I, personally, find packaging VERY appealing.

(As an aside, because of the unique needs and limited funds of each of my nonprofit clients, I do not use “embed[ed] and duplicated libraries in every [or any] project”; in other words, I see packaging as extremely appropriate and have absolutely no aversion to creating and/or working with Debian’s excellent packaging system and building packages that, ideally, Linitian finds do not have bugs or violate policy.

Cordially,

David

You’re right about web devs – the once I’ve had to work with lately are pushing everything with git, which is sub-optimal but they have no idea what packaging really is. The section in the book is already excellent but a quick and dirty howto would indeed go a long way. Shouldn’t be a problem to put one together in your copious free time (haha).

Best

But rest assured that we *will* update the book, That said there are no plans to expand the section about packaging. If anything, I think the topic deserves a separate book/document. I might work on this at some point…

BTW, I’m not so convinced that web developers will find packaging very appealing… they are so used to embed and duplicated libraries in every project, I doubt they’d be thrilled to have to manage proper dependencies instead (with the implication on the testing that it requires).

I’d say the section on packaging debs is one of the most important and poorly understood/least documented. A bit more on that at some point would be nice and I’ll try to contribute to that in the future. I think that once even a lot of web developers etc. understand how incredibly useful packaging is, it will take off like wildfire and hopefully get some more developers to the debian project as a whole.

Thanks again for all you are doing.

It will likely still be printed with Lulu unless a project with an editor comes to fruition in time for the release…