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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 20/07/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Zed Shaw</b> <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:zedshaw@zedshaw.com" target="_blank">zedshaw@zedshaw.com</a>
> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>If there are Debian people who like running Mongrel on their computers<br>then I'd ask that you step up and help. The fact that I'm holding back
<br>a release out of frustration from one distro (that I actually use) is<br>enough for me to not want to support it. I have had less trouble<br>supporting windows than Debian, which is just insane.</blockquote>
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<div>Zed,</div>
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<div>I have written a capistrano based Debian machine builder which builds Debian based Virtual Machines automatically and sits them on top of Xen (it also builds the Xen controller automatically). The idea is to build machines internally for testing purposes and also to bring the Bytemark VM service (
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.bytemark.co.uk/" target="_blank">www.bytemark.co.uk</a>) up to a level where you can deploy Rails apps to the machine. Bytemark provide mirror support to both Rubyforge and Debian and they are just up the road from me.
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<div>The idea was to have the RailsMachine gem deploy onto the base the tool built. But the lack of a Debian Apache 2.2 package has put the mockers on that. So (with extreme respect to the RailMachine crew) I've created an augmentation that is a little more flexible.
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<div>It handles the automatic backporting of ruby 1.8.4 to Debian Stable and you can choose which release of Debian you want to use on each VM (other than the external Bytemark ones - which are always Sarge). Importantly it also knows all the dependencies required to run the various gems and packages required by Rails and mysql.
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<div>I have a gem setup (vmbuilder), but I haven't released anything yet because the tool is not quite production ready. There are a lot of holes in it (primarily the lack of an Apache 2.0/pound combination that saves backporting Apache
2.2), but the basic Mongrel/Ruby/Mysql system is fully operational.</div>
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<div>The documentation is also only half-way there - although its not much more than describing your machine requirements in either Ruby or YAML and then doing 'rake vm:setup'.</div>
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<div>If anybody would find this useful I'll try and get the Gem up over the weekend. But please remember that it is very half-baked at the moment.</div>
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