alt Hacker NewsThank you to all the Debian volunteers that make Debian and all its derivatives possible. It's remarkable how many people and businesses have been enabled by your work. Thank you!
On a personal note, Trixie is very exciting for me because my side project, ntfy [1], was packaged [2] and is now included in Trixie. I only learned about the fact that it was included very late in cycle when the package maintainer asked for license clarifications. As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine). I approached the maintainer and just recently added build tags [3] to make it easier to remove Stripe, Firebase and WebPush, so that the next Debian-ized version will not have to contain (so many) awkward patches.
As an "upstream maintainer", I must say it isn't obvious at all why the web app wasn't included. It was clearly removed on purpose [4], but I don't really know what to do to get it into the next Debian release. Doing an "apt install ntfy" is going to be quite disappointing for most if the web app doesn't work. Any help or guidance is very welcome!
[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ntfy
[3] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/pull/1420
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/ahmadkhalifa/ntfy/-/blob/debian/lat...
Replies
On the web part:
Debian sources need to be sufficient to build. So for npm projects, you usually have a debian-specific package.json where each npm dependency (transitively, including devDependencies needed for build) needs to either be replaced with its equivalent debian package (which may also need to be ported), vendored (usually less ideal, especially for third-party code), or removed. Oh, and enjoy aligning versions for all of that. That's doable but non-trivial work with such a sizable lockfile. If I would guess the maintainer couldn't justify the extra effort and taking on combing through all those packages.
I also think in either case the Debian way would probably be to split it out as a complementary ntfy-web package.
Just wanted to say thanks for ntfy! I use it daily to notify me on events from my home Meshtastic node.
Thank you for ntfy, it's such a useful piece of software!
It might be a better idea to release this as a container (if it isn't already) to take care of the dependencies.
> As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine).
My advise to you is to deny all support from people using the Debian version of your software and automatically close all bug tickets from Debian saying you don’t support externally patched software.
You would be far from the first to do so and it’s a completely rational and sane decision. You don’t have to engage with the insanity that Debian own policies force on its maintainers and users.
ntfy is a very useful tool. Thank you very much for making it and also for maintaining the ntfy.sh service for those of us too lazy to self host.
The maintainer has a short explanation here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1098866#10
> The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.
Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.