Backdrop CMS Support in Aegir?

+1

Recently on IRC:

16:42 ergonlogic@> anarcat: what are your thoughts on backdrop? 
16:42 ergonlogic@> it appears to respond to a number of concerns I've heard voiced about Drupal's direction over the past few years
16:43 ergonlogic@> It looks like Drush isn't very interested in supporting it, which is a shame
16:44 ergonlogic@> but I think Aegir should
16:44 ergonlogic@> I think it might be a good place to start for the alien cms support
16:44 ergonlogic@> since it isn't very alien at all
16:45 ergonlogic@> but might prove useful in abstracting our platform code
16:46    anarcat@> agreed
16:46 ergonlogic@> since I think we basically depend on being able to bootstrap drupal through drush at this point
16:46 ergonlogic@> whcih we may not be able to do for backdrop
16:46 ergonlogic@> but otherwise platforms, and install procedure should be pretty close

OK. So with Aegir project lead blessing we seem to have consensus that Aegir intends to support Backdrop CMS, no matter if Drush devs will have similar consensus or not. It seems that if there will be no official support, there will be Drush fork maintained - see: https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/47

I just asked the Drush maintainers straight-out for their opinion on supporting Backdrop in https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/issues/141

in case it wasn't clear from the irc log: +1

i also heard at drupalcon that pantheon successfully provision backdropcms.

Out-of-the-box Backdrop won't install on Aegir. Most of the reason for this is the Drupal 8 style file layout, putting everything in core/, but having mostly Drupal 7 code. To get Drush to recognize it as Drupal 7, and Aegir to install it, I created a few symlinks:

ln -s core/includes .
ln -s core/modules .
ln -s core/misc .

... and then changed the version string from 8.x to 7.x.

I also had to comment-out an include from provision's install_7.inc, since includes/entity.inc has gone away. This obviously isn't the right way to go here, assuming it's still required for D7 installs. But we could easily enough add another symlink to the file containing the required code. I just didn't bother to figure out what it is yet :p

Relevant patches attached for experimentation.

For the sake of posterity, here's a screenshot of the first documented Backdrop install in Aegir :)

@niccolo: Are you looking for #1194602: [meta] Support the hosting of Drupal 8 sites