Hi,
as some of you already heard, I am in the act of modernising the
Debian Edu Main Server. At Debian Reunion Hamburg, I gave an
elaborate presentaiton about the ideas and concepts. I will make a
write up of it, but for now the bottom line is:
* LDAP and Kerberos are robust and well-established, but somewhat
unflexible when it comes to decentralising services
* Educational tools are moving to the web, so we need a backend
for modern web applications
* Debian Edu loses against alternatives like Linuxmuster because
GOSa is dated, and too complex for average teachers
* I want to replace GOSa, LDAP and Kerberos with AlekSIS [0]
and nss-pam-webapi [1], with a row of benefits
The presentation from Hamburg is here [2], without knowing how useful
it is without the audio track.
The changes are quite pervasive, and originally, I wanted to work in a
fork of the debian-edu packages, with my own apt repository and CD
images, but consensus in Hamburg (with Holger, mostly) seems to be I
should work in Debian main, in the experimental suite, because it
eases the process, makes the changes easily visible and tesable for
everyone, etc.
Now, we are unsure what version numbers to use, so we do not put
unstable updates at risk. The idea we drafted is:
* In unstable, we develop 2.12.* ("incarnation" 2, for Debian 12),
with the classical tjener and all
* In experimental, we develop 3.12.* ("incarnation" 3, for Debian 13)
* When the bookworm release approaches, we choose one of the two, and
start calling it 13.* (dropping the first version number part),
which looks like cool hipster software, and is guaranteed to be
higher than anything we can ever come up with in the meantime.
Does that sound good, or does anyone see issues with it / have a
better idea?
I am currently working with Phil Hands on how to get a CD image build
pulling in experimental packages, and will work with Thomas Lange in
Regensburg on approaches for config and package management based on
web APIs.
Cheers,
Nik
[0] https://aleksis.org
[1] https://edugit.org/lanki.cloud/glue/nss-pam-webapi
[2] https://leopard.exchange/s/E55J9SdSAW985JP
--
Dominik George (1. Vorstandsvorsitzender, pädagogischer Leiter)
Teckids e.V. — Digitale Freiheit mit Jugend und Bildung
https://www.teckids.org/
