Rapache on Ubuntu 10.04 ? Not likely.

This post is outdated! Rapache is back !

Along with the last LTS release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx, there have been a few requests to bring back Rapache and make it work on the newer Ubuntu releases. (what’s Rapache ? Here’s all the posts about it)

Will it happen ? Probably not. Here’s why.

A bit of history

Rapache has been my first real open source project and a good excuse to learn Python programming and do something useful. While the name and icon has been brought by others, the concept and coding for the very first release has been done entirely by me. (read the announcement)

The first version of Rapache

While the concept has not been appreciated by some, the software proved itself useful for some and I soon received a helping hand from another person, Jason, who helped me developing and added himself a terrific number of features and improvements.

Along with my newly found mate, newer releases flew. A plug-in system, advanced virtual hosting editing, Apache’s modules configuration, GUI tweakings, and so on. The Apache config parser has been rewrote 3 times, and I’d dare to say that the last version of it (even though not feature complete) is pretty good.

Eventually, Rapache made it to the Ubuntu Universe repository.

Everything was working fine, and, even if we had pretty much no feedback for the program (yes, we almost never heard a word from our users, we knew the software was used just thanks to Popcon stats and the very few number of bugs reported), we began to work onto the next version, with the radical changes needed to support the SSH protocol.

This is the SSH alpha which will never see the light.

Then Jauny Jackalope came out

When Ubuntu 9.04, we found out that Rapache wasn’t working anymore. Even though the bug had been reported before Ubuntu’s final release, we began looking into it only some day after such release. For sure I undervalued it.

Why does Rapache freeze when you try to do almost anything ?

Funnily enough, with people reporting the bug, Jason and I finally discovered to have some users !

We traced back the problem to be in python-gksu2. There was apparently no other explanation, since until Hardy Rapache was working fine. While I was working on a fix, Jason released a quick patch to solve temporarily the problem. I posted it on Launchpad, then asked Emanuele (emgent), a MOTU which was - formally - part of the team and official packager to issue a SRU to fix the problem.

Nobody, not Emanuele, nor the MOTU team, not anybody else ever did that.

The removal

Since I was not satisfacted with the quick fix, I began to work on a better solution. I never found it. I haven’t been able to trace out in google any similar problem with python-gksu2, nor I ever got any response from the MOTU channel. In many ways I considered and still regard that bug as an Ubuntu bug, not really Rapache’s.

Then I made a radical change in my life and moved to another city for a while (almost a year).

In the mean time, Rapache, since not working was stripped from Debian. I am fine with that, it never really worked in Debian, simply because it was packaged like shit on it, and un-updated. Funnily, people reporting the bug in Debian seemed pretty happy to have the program and the need of patching it manually to make it start seemed normal to them.

Right after being removed from Debian, Rapache got removed from Ubuntu repositories as well. I am very fine with that too as it has unmaintained for a long time, and it’s good for distribution to strip non-working packages.

A second try

Recently a french guy proposed to help and handed me a quick patch to substitute python-gksu2 with a normal dialog. With my surprise and horror, that would freeze Rapache as well.

My guess is there is something bad about the threads in the program, but frankly I couldn’t find out what. In my own opinion, the only right thing to do would be to re-engineer the whole GUI, move away from python-gksu2, implement D-BUS and Policy Kit. That would require an awful lot of time (also consider the code is not that clean, being that my first experience with Python).

Why Rapache won’t be brought back

So in true open source fashion, as the maintainer of this project, I am going to arbitrarily drop off the face off the of this earth for purely selfish reasons, and leave the entire cause in limbo. That is how open source projects truly die. But hey, all the material is out there for y’all to see (it’s “open source” in it’s own way), so maybe someone else will take up the cause. Carry on, lusers!
– Linux Hater’s [source]

I have no time, and not good motivation to re-engineer the whole software. Development has been hard sometime, I spent a nice bunch of sleepless nights and I’m frankly not willing to put that much energy into Rapache development anymore.

Normally, this would mean the software would be maintained with small fixes, just to keep it useful and working for the users. But here we have a software with a big problem, thus requiring a lot of work.

A lot of you have been asking what you can do to help. The answer is very simple though unpleasing: fix it. Do it for yourself, do it for the community or don’t do it at all and pass by. Shall you wish, you can even fork it, it’s free software, you have the full right to do that.

My final stance is the following:

• I won’t probably fix it for a long time, since I have to work to make a living.
• If somebody forks it, I’m totally okay with that, as long as he changes the name of the software
• If somebody fix it and publishes a (really) working branch for Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 in that case:
  • I am available to publish it on the Rapache PPA.
  • I’ll include him in the dev team
  • I’ll help maintain the software with small fixes
  • I won’t ever spend time, not even 5 minute, to get Rapache included into an Ubuntu official repository. MOTU are for that, I won’t propose it for inclusion or do any work that doesn’t belong to the upstream domain.

Shall you wish to install the broken Rapache under Ubuntu 10.04 (for patching and use or development), you can download the code with this command:

bzr branch lp:rapache

I’m sincerely happy to have helped the community, even for just one year. Big thanks to Jason and to everybody who helped.

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