Hi friends,

We are crowd funding to be able to package grunt and browserify node
modules in debian. You can see the details here
http://igg.me/at/debian-browserify

Basically it requires packaging a lot of tiny node modules . The
dependency tree with current status is here
https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks/grunt

Background:

Javascript used to only a browser thingy but some folks figured we can
use javascript on the server side as well (in place of your php, ruby on
rails or python) using a javascript runtime (Node JS).

Node community follows the lego approach and use tiny modules to create
bigger modules and applications. This means a software like grunt, which
gives similar functionality of make is built using 100s of node modules.

But on the browser it is efficient to combine all the modules into a
single file and compress it (minify and gzip). Many web based
applications like diaspora, gitlab, prometheus, pagure etc needs these
libraries in combined single file form (browserified and minified).

Debian has strict policies regarding the source code for each of the
packages we ship in debian's main section. Debian's FTP masters have
ruled these browserified files cannot be considered as source. So we
need to browserify these libraries when we create the debian package and
we need tools like grunt, gulp, browserify and webpack in debian.

handlebars (required for diaspora and prometheus), fuzzaldrin-plus
(required for gitlab) and jquery-textcomplete (required for pagure) uses
grunt, so we decided to package grunt first.

You can follow the campaign on diaspora
https://poddery.com/tags/debian-browserify (#debian-browserify on any pod).

Contribute to this campaign so we can work full time on this project and
have these important free software packages (important for Freedom in
the cloud) distributed in debian main. Without grunt in main these
packages have to moved to contrib section, which does not get the same
level of support as main.

Even if you cannot contribute financially, you can help by promoting the
campaign in your circles. You can also help by packaging some of these
libraries. They are very easy to package and usually takes about half an
hour to complete (for simple cases). Sarath has already joined us in
packaging some libraries.

Campaigns like this helps us sustain ourselves and spend more time on
Free Software activities without having to work on other projects. Money
raised through campaigns like this funds our other packaging works,
talks, workshops etc.

We have to change our perspectives from being just users to being
funders of the important software we depends on every day. Not just our
crowd funding, any crowd funded Free Software development is important
to make sure the projects we depend on are healthy and features we
desperately need can be developed so we don't have to go back to using
proprietary software and services with the excuse of "Free Software is
missing so and so features" (quite often heard in the context of
WhatsApp, Facebook, Github.com etc)

Thanks
Praveen

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

_______________________________________________
network mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in

Reply via email to