Some people say that they won’t install Passenger until native Linux packages are available.
Well, we’ve made some modifications to Passenger to make packagers’ lives a bit easier:
- There’s now a Rake task called fakeroot. This generates a directory hierarchy in pkg/fakeroot, which can be directly turned into a native package.
- There’s also a package:debian task which generates a Debian package. But this Debian package is very generic. For example, it doesn’t specify any dependencies at all, because:
- Passenger requires fastthread, and Debian doesn’t provide a native package for that.
- Lots of people have Ruby and/or Apache installed from source.
Despite that, our Debian package specification files can be used as a base for packagers who wish to create more distribution-specific packages.
We’re looking for volunteers who wish to maintain packages for their distribution. Packagers should:
- package early, package often. Native packages should follow as soon as possible after a Passenger release. Or – preferably – be released at the same time.
- test early, test often. Packagers should test our development version from time to time to verify that generated packages still work.
- drink beer with us.
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Needless to say, the more Linux packages we can put on our website, the better. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer. Thanks. 