Hi,
Thank you for opening the discussion!
Yes we’ve heard quite a few requests for improving our release method for Linux (both clients and servers). I’ll first try to list all the requirements we’ve heard and then explain the current status and our plan.
Requirements:
- The Linux clients (both GUI and CLI clients) should be able to installed from a debian repository. It would be even better if official RPM packages are available too.
- Linux clients should get into the official Debian repositories. Similar for RPM packages.
- The Linux server packages should be available in Deb and RPM format. And they should be installed from a repository too.
The current status:
- Currently Linux clients can only be downloaded as a single deb package, not from a repository. RPM packages are not officially maintained. But there is an non-official package maintained by contributor: https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/seafile-clients-linux.md. But it’s not always up-to-date.
- The debian package of Seafile isn’t in Debian official repositories, due to strict copyright requirements in Debian. You can see the discussions https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/666. The core issue is that we use some code from Git project (GPLv3). We also use OpenSSL. However, Debian rules doesn’t allow GLP software to link with OpenSSL. This is not a general copyright issue, since Git itself links with OpenSSL too. So by default they’ve added exception to allow their GPL code to link with OpenSSL.
- Seafile server is not a single-component system daemon like MySQL. It’s an application server contains both daemons written in C and web front-end written in Python. (Even more components for the Pro Edition.) Installing python web application in standard Debian/RPM way is troublesome. So if we would provide a deb or rpm package, the file system layout after installation would still be different from traditional ones.
Our plan:
- We’ll provide a debian/ubuntu repository for installing seafile client. This may be based on this contribution: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/pull/1686. But we haven’t decided about the package organization yet (single package like it is now, or multiple packages). We want to listen to the users about their opinion.
- The next step is to resolve the copyright issue for entering debian official repositories.
- We’ve been undecided about using deb package to release servers, due to the concerns stated above. But we’ve seen a lot requests for it. It does makes Seafile more “standard”. Now we’ve decided to approach this goal in multiple steps and solve issues we may meet piece by piece.
We want to listen to your opinions.