On our servers we only install software from Debian packages, or our own software with install scripts from our own CVS. This at first seems a bit mad, especially to Ruby on Rails people who love their gems. But it’s a sane way of managing lots of servers (we’ve got 7 Debian servers, and 2 FreeBSD servers to run at the moment).

Of course, you could install packages on them from CPAN, from Ruby Gems, by compiling them yourself and putting them in /usr/local. But you’d have to have another system for each packages system to keep track of what you’d installed and what version, and to worry about security updates. And you’d lose some of the benefits of dependency checking.

Most of our servers are, inevitably, still running Debian Sarge (the latest and greatest when we started them a few years ago). We’re going to gradually upgrade them to Debian Etch, but it is going to take a while. In the fast moving world of Rails this isn’t particularly helpful, so you have to backport packages. I couldn’t find any, so have made some myself.

You can find packages for Rails 1.2.5-1 on Sarge in our Debian package repository. Yeah, still an old version for you people “living on the edge”, but it’s the one in Etch (the latest Debian stable), and is way better than 0.13.1-1 that we had before 🙂

(Shh, don’t tell anyone, but this post is really just so the bots find debian.mysociety.org, but I’m going to try and fill it with some other content so you don’t think I’m being too rude)

Debian’s software “packaging” system provides a big database of all the open source software in the world, and makes another smaller database of all the software installed on your computer. We’re using it on our new servers, which the sites are gradually migrating to now. When you’ve got security updates, multiple machines, and complex software dependencies, you need it.

Unfortunately, though it seems like the Debian people have packaged nearly all the software in the world, sometimes they miss things. Normally we’d just install them using the old Unix configure/make/make install. This time we’ve decided to do it properly, and make our own Debian packages. You can find them at debian.mysociety.org.

The advantage of this is that we can find out where any file on the system came from. We can easily upgrade multiple machines, and check that they all have the same software installed. This makes it much less likely that there’ll be bugs when you go to a corner of one of the websites, and get an error because a perl module wasn’t installed.

So far there are a few perl module .deb files in our repository, which the handy dh-make-perl builds easily from a perl module tarball. There’s also Xapian (a search engine library), which we use for quick lookups in Gaze (our gazeteer). That had already been packaged by the Xapian people, but for some reason I had to recompile it. Finally there’s one Python module, PyRTF, which makes Python modules, which I just packaged (probably badly).

Anyway, this post is here to make sure anybody searching for python2.3-pyrtf on Google will find something…