launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Sidnei da Silva <sidnei.da.silva@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 9:10 PM, James Westby <jw+debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Not that it is necessarily a terrible idea, but isn't there something that
> can be done that doesn't require running essentially a whole new machine
> to hack on Launchpad?

I'm sure it is possible, given enough resources. Ubuntu One has
something along those lines: they start a bunch of services (Postgres
most notably) as an unpriviledged user, running on an unpriviledged
port. The same could be done for Launchpad. Roughly, off the top of my
head, Apache and Postgres are the system-wide services that are
touched by rocketfuel-setup. The following could be done to work
around it:

- Generating an Apache configuration file, binding to a random
unpriviledged and unused port
- Creating a new Postgres cluster on a user directory, or even inside
the build directory, also binding to a random unpriviledged and unused
port
- Starting up Postgres and Apache as the current user
...
- Profit?!

I'm sure someone from the Ubuntu One team could comment on this. Their
approach seems very simple and cowboy-ish, but in practice works
nicely. The only thing I didn't quite swallow was the fact they do all
this setup from scratch every time you run 'make start', so it takes a
little bit longer than what I find acceptable.

-- Sidnei