Any chance of coordinating with Debian and Ubuntu to get up-to-date packages into the official Debian and Ubuntu repositories?

Ubuntu has a backports repository which would be an appropriate venue for the latest and greatest of nginx, phusion passenger, etc.

That's exactly what we're trying to do. We've already contacted Debian/Ubuntu packagers about this.

You'll likely want to start by filing either an ITP or RFP "bug" against Debian's wnpp pseudo-package, depending on who will be maintaining the package.

http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

It would be really nice if they had a plain http version of the repo. The reason is, if I include the HTTPS repo in my deployment script, and it's the first time I've run it on a new Debian server, it fails to do an apt-get update because apt-transport-https isn't installed yet.

What with package signing, having an HTTPS repo is kind of pointless.

+1. Using HTTP over HTTPS also assists with proxy caching. This can help things like CI run much faster in datacenter environments.

Can't you just create a local APT mirror?

Sure you can, but for the entire archive? Running a caching HTTP proxy is far easier and more lightweight.

So run a caching HTTPS proxy instead?

Certainly off topic, but I'm curious if anyone has experience running Python apps under passenger. Loved Passenger when I was deploying Rails apps and would like to hear people's thoughts on it for Python.

I know of several large users of Python + Phusion Passenger. Globo.com, one of the largest media companies in Brazil, runs Django on Phusion Passenger on some of their sites. There was also a site that monitors the forest firefighting progress in California, that runs on Python + Phusion Passenger. Unfortunately I forgot its name.

We run Graphite (a Django app) on Phusion Passenger on our internal servers.

By the way, we open source Node.js support in 4.0.16. Previously it was only available in the Enterprise variant. You can learn more at https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Node.js