launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sidnei da Silva <sidnei.da.silva@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 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.

FWIW, we had this option for Subversion development too -- run Apache on
an uprivileged port as a regular user.  It seems to work fine in
practice.  It also protects us from whatever random things might be in
the system-wide Apache or Postgres configuration.

I think reliability and predictability ("I can get this up and running,
if I decide I want to hack on it at all") are much more important than
startup time, if there has to be a tradeoff.

-Karl