Packaging with translations

Last month, looking to set up a Git workflow, I got sidetracked by Aegir. Aegir has a long history, born out of hostmaster it has been developed by Adrian, one of the earliest kitten slayers and nourished by many others. During my first Drupalcon in Paris people were going on about it already but I never considered it to be worthfull for a simple single person wannabe themer designer. I believed that features integration and installation profiles would be the hot thing in 2010 and thought nothing more of Aegir than it being a more technical version of Acquia Drupal for hardcore developers. And without Dmitri Gaskin's drush_make and mig5's incredibly detailed installation instructions I would have been right. 

Also, I did decide to figure out Ubuntu. The things you do for Drupal.

Eventually I beelined from single shared hosting installations via shared hosting multisite and drush managed multisites on vps to the need for a version controled environment with managed installations. Winter had passed and 2010 had come. Guess what system was now handling Installation profiles with features integration? Aegir. And then I found Miguel's article on integrating Aegir with a git workflow. So that's it. If you are at that point that you want to have the best of the best, whatever it takes, try Aegir.

Some things are still less than perfect. 

You still need to be smarter than I am or be familiar with ruby to set up your own gitorious environment on Ubuntu. At some point I threw in the towel on that one. Ber Kessels suggested to me to give it another year and go with github in the mean time.

I will have to move my live & staging server from directadmin to virtualmin if I want to be sure that they can run together. Not that virtualmin is supported with Aegir but at least somebody has figured out how to set it up. If you use plesk, you are more fortunate. Integration modules are available.

Drush_make and localization aren't talking yet.

Gabor and others have put in a lot of effort to set up localize.drupal.org. Their focus, however, seems to lay on getting l10n_update to work when integration with drush_make is what is really needed first. Development seed have their own language server setup for Open Atrium so their incentive to get drush_make to read localize.drupal.org multi-versioned language packages is not one born of necessity. On the other hand Gabor is not eager on at least providing the packages, insisting that this would culminate in too many files to track. I do not agree. Git could control this and I think that disk space is cheap. On the other hand the scale here may be such that I do not know what I am talking about.