[Freedombox-discuss] Owncloud, Piwigo, Gogs, Matrix, ...

Stefan Monnier monnier at IRO.UMontreal.CA
Wed Jun 21 13:33:26 UTC 2017

I've been maintaining "home servers" for many years now, first using
OpenWRT and then Debian.

Maintaining those boxes with Debian is a lot easier than with OpenWRT,
thanks to the great job done by the Debian project: the
unattended-upgrades package takes care of the main work, and an
occasional "apt-get upgrade" takes care of the rest.

But there's always been a sore point: it seems that packages that I could
describe as "cloud service", like owncloud, piwigo, gitlab and friends
are rarely available in Debian, and when they are it tends to be
short lived (after taking a long time to appear).

IIUC this is due to the enormous amount of work needed to massage the
upstream package so that it fits well within the Debian system, abiding
by the various conventions, etc...

So, I'm wondering what do people do to maintain those services on their
private server (presumably running freedombox) with a minimum of hassle?

I've seen indications that Docker is considered as a potential solution,
but the way I look at it, it's more a problem than a solution: now
instead of one server with N applications, I have one server running
N applications run inside N containers, so it just adds N containers to
the set of software that I have to keep up-to-date and Docker itself
doesn't provide much help in keeping all those things updated.


More information about the Freedombox-discuss mailing list