Shoal Project - Packaging and Deployment

by fenekku for Kernel.org - the Linux Kernel Organization

Statistics gathering over web servers / mirrors is not as readily available for systems administrators as the numerous logging features of current servers would lead one to believe. Making high level sense of the large amount of data coming from these computers is still challenging. The Shoal project tries to solve this problem by aggregating information from the numerous logs and presenting the system administrators with an interface to query relevant information from their data e.g. How many downloads of distribution X were downloaded in Germany in the past week? As a very young project, the Shoal project still lacks deployment capabilities, thus making it hard to propagate its potential benefits to other system administrators. This is where my project comes in. It would be the packaging of the application in such a way as to be deployable on other computers. System administrators would simply have to download the Debian or RPM package and then respectively do dpkg -i pkg.deb or rpm -Uvh pkg.rpm to install it. Eventually the goal would be to have the packages hosted in a repository so that apt-get install Shoal be all that is needed.