[Kolab-devel] Please get rid of OpenPKG (was: Re: Fwd: [ANNOUNCE] OpenPKG project diverges 2-STABLE branch)

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Bernhard,

forgive my ignorance but ...

> Of course we should go onto this stable branch with the Kolab Server.
> The question is when?

I would vote to do it never.

In my opinion the focus of Kolab to OpenPKG is one of the biggest mistakes
around Kolab. It hinders people to install it because they break almost
every part of their system behind.

Currently I'm using Kolab on a Debian server with an additional instance of
Apache for serving additional websites. Although all this would be possible
within the Kolab environment, I want to stick to standardized paths and
configurations, just to make maintenance of this server easier for myself.
Unfortunately this has some bad side effects for both me and you:

- Need to upgrade two systems in one (with different upgrade methods)
- You need to maintain extra software which would have been provided by
  upstream distributions
- Configuration difficulties/hacks/unclean solutions
- Server slowdown because of duplicate work / memory usage

As far as I remember the reason for you choosing OpenPKG was that you did
need to make some changes to other products like Postfix. Is this still
true or did they incorporate your changes meanwhile? Is anybody working on
this?

If that is not done yet and Kolab still depends on changed components, I
suggest that you create an own distribution which is built on e.g. Debian
and contains the modified components inside.

This would be far easier to setup and still covers the advantage of having a
fully integrated Kolab system.

Kind regards
- michael