[Kolab-announce] This week's progress, and work ahead

Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
Fri Aug 10 15:21:27 CEST 2012


Hi there,

After a couple of weeks of silence I feel the need to re-introduce our 
weeklies - so welcome.

A heads-up: This is a rather long email.

In this email:

* Kolab 3.0 alpha1 towards Kolab 3.0 final
* Documentation (General and Upgrade Paths)
* LDAP
* Packaging
* Localization
* Bug Reporting

So, I suppose everyone already knows what has happened last week. We have 
released our first installable version of the long awaited Kolab 3 series, be 
it in alpha stage.

But what has happened over the past few weeks, and what is still ahead of us?

== Kolab 3.0 alpha1 towards Kolab 3.0 final ==

Finally feature-complete, Kolab 3.0 will largely only stabilize further from 
this point on forward. There's a couple of enhancements pending still, that 
are not of great impact (such as a Shared Folders interface in the Web 
Administration Panel).

There's many things still left on our TODO list, including providing the 
necessary documentation to upgrade existing Kolab deployments to Kolab 3.0. In 
testing these upgrades now, we find issues with the tool chain we provide that 
will need to be resolved before we can publish the documentation on 
docs.kolab.org[1]. We appreciate help in testing real-life upgrade scenarios! 
I myself, for one, have so far used the real-life test corpus I'd like to call 
"our corporate Kolab Systems corporate server".

== Documentation (General and Upgrade Paths) ==

There's a lot of work in documentation, which is easy enough to contribute to 
when considering most of the information on the Kolab wiki is outdated for 
native packaging, though some information is still very relevant (such as the 
Fighting Spam[2] article, that has been included in the Administrator 
Guide[3]).

We have 4 different upgrade scenarios to document;

1) Upgrade from an OpenPKG installation (Kolab 2.2 or 2.3),

2) Upgrade from a Kolab 2.4 installation (with native packages),

3) Upgrading Cyrus IMAP from 2.3 to 2.4 (third-party product integration),

4) Upgrading the format from Kolab v2 to the new Kolab v3.

While I myself am working on 1) in combination with 4), I learn a couple of 
things about 2) and 3) as well, but I'm merely migrating data over and 
upgrading the format. Given the lessons learned[4], it will take us a little 
while longer than we expected, to come up with a properly documented upgrade 
path that is likely to work for most of you.

For those of you interested in working on the upgrade path(s), please see the 
documentation GIT repository[5] where the texts are being developed and 
maintained (see the Upgrading_*.xml files).

== LDAP ==

While the data is being worked on, this means that for a migration of LDAP 
data, we, the community at large, would appreciate help.

If a migration of LDAP data (from OpenLDAP to 389 Directory Server) isn't 
desirable, then perhaps a data migration from OpenLDAP on a Kolab OpenPKG 
deployment to OpenLDAP on native packages is.

I have completed the base integration layer necessary to have the Kolab daemon 
run against an OpenLDAP server[6] using Syncrepl, during our Sprint in 
Berlin[7], which needs testing, bug reports and perhaps even some further 
development.

== Packaging ==

We have many users interested in Debian and/or Ubuntu packages, but we do not 
have the packagers to do the packaging. So far, I've only managed to get Kolab 
2.4 on Squeeze to a state in which it is missing only the Roundcube 
packages[8], after which we can start testing how well "setup-kolab" behaves 
and deal with the fallout. Naturally, work is needed for Kolab 3.0, and for 
Wheezy, Sid and Ubuntu platform versions.

Become a Kolab Community champion by providing the many users with the few 
packages. Apply on the Kolab development mailing list, or contact me or 
Torsten Grote <grote at kolabsys.com>.

== Localization ==

Most of the Kolab components these days allow their texts to be localized, 
including the Kolab daemon, SMTP Access Policy, command-line tools, and the 
Web Administration Panel and API. We are aware our strongest userbase is in 
Europe, and we all know many different languages are spoken in Europe.

We currently have a lack of expertise on localization (especially as it 
concerns PyKolab), so here too is an opportunity for one of you to become a 
Kolab Community champion! Contact us on the Kolab development mailing list if 
you are interested.

== Bug Reporting ==

We encourage you to log tickets in our issue tracker[9], whether the issue be 
big or small. We apply two golden rules (of thumb);

- If something is unexpected, it is a bug.
- If it isn't in Bugzilla, it doesn't exist.

We therefore encourage you to take everything that raises your eyebrow or 
doesn't quite work the way you expected, and put it in a ticket.

Thank you,

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

[1] http://docs.kolab.org
[2] http://wiki.kolab.org/Fighting_spam
[3] http://docs.kolab.org/en-
US/Kolab_Groupware/3.0/html/Administrator_Guide/chap-Administrator_Guide-
Combating_Spam.html
[4] 
https://bugzilla.kolabsys.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=745&hide_resolved=0
[5] http://git.kolab.org/kolab-docs/tree/Administrator_Guide/en-US
[6] 
http://git.kolab.org/pykolab/commit/?id=8f5dacadddb345932df7b3f3c0a7b2511ae71268
[7] http://wiki.kolab.org/Sprints/Berlin2012
[8] https://bugzilla.kolabsys.com/buglist.cgi?bug_id=908,909,910
[9] http://issues.kolab.org

-- 
Systems Architect, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
m: +44 74 2516 3817
w: http://www.kolabsys.com

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