Debian package support

[sentaidigital]

As I have posted an inquiry in the past about an updated drush Debian package, I received this email earlier today:

In #823767, I have requested from the FTP-masters that Drush be removed
from Debian. In the ~9 months since it was orphaned, no one stepped up
to start maintaining the Drush package, let alone update it to a current
version. There was some movement on the Ubuntu side of things (also in
CC), but it seems it didn't end up going anywhere.

It seems clear to me no one is available to do that task and having an
outdated version of Drush in Debian is hurting both projects for no good
reason. At least that is the constant feedback I receive, both privately
and through the above bug reports.

So unless someone steps up now to tell the FTP-masters to stop, it
will be removed as soon as they take a look at bug #823767.

Link to the bug.

Is there someone in the drush-ops community that can step up and take over maintainership of this Debian package? As this package feeds into the Ubuntu repositories, too, I have found it to be very useful setting up new development environments for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, including all the necessary dependencies.

I know this can be done with Composer, but I would prefer official packages from the distro vendor for two reasons:

1. Upstream support from the distro: If I have a support contract with Canonical, they will support packages in their repositories, but may not do so for packages installed by Composer.
2. Software inventory: Project managers and CSOs need to be able to specify the software installed for a project and be able to do an audit of the same. The distro's repositories are already part of that audit process, and any package in it is easy to track.

[joetri]

Second this request if it's possible. I know and trust Debian and apt-get install is a thing of beauty!

[anarcat]

I was the maintainer of the Debian package and wrote the above comment. I'd be glad to answer any more questions about the current situation in Debian.

Keep in mind the version in Debian was Drush 5, which is probably considered prehistoric by Drush's community standards (if any).

Do note that Drush was already removed from Debian unstable and testing:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/drush

But it will stick around for longer in Debian 7 wheezy (5.4, 2 more years of LTS) and Debian 8 jessie (5.10, around 5 more years).

[colans]

From @ergonlogic in the other issue:

FWIW, I have a proof-of-concept packaging script over in https://github.com/ergonlogic/drush.deb.

We've been looking at doing this in Aegir too: Maintain Drush Debian packages

[greg-1-anderson]

Maintained elsewhere now, as explained above.