[Kolab-devel] Volunteers for Kolab_Server at OpenPKG2.5 step up! :-)

[thomas+kolab at lotterer.net]

Dear Kolab Community!

I'm looking for volunteers which help me getting as many Kolab
Server excrescences as possible back into OpenPKG. You know
the genuine way installing Kolab Server is to run "obmtool",
which installs a OpenPKG instance below /kolab, a "parallel
world" inside your Unix operating system. I understand some Linux
enthusiasts prefer a native Distro approach. There is nothing
wrong with that desire but that's not the direction I'm heading.
Others do not like OpenPKG because it's development was under the
control of a telecommunication company. Not anymore. Today the
project is backed by the OpenPKG Foundation e.V., a nonprofit
organization providing the ideational, financial, material and
manned support of the OpenPKG project [2] and Steffen Hansen
represents the Kolab Konsortium as an active member.

When Kolab Server was created the developers took a lot of OpenPKG
packages to create a solution. Some existing packages were
modified to suit specific needs and other packages were added.
Without synchronizing the changes back from Kolab Server into
pristine OpenPKG the two camps diverge over time. The greater
the distance of the development branches the harder to merge
modificatios and features from Kolab Server into OpenPKG and
security fixes and vendor updates into Kolab Server. My goal is to
align them once in a while. I did it in the past and now I want to
do it again.

The latest obmtool configuration along with the Kolab Server
modified packages can be found online [3]. My approach is to find
people who use exactly that version. They need to have a sound
knowledge of system administration and troubleshooting. I will
make them move to OpenPKG CURRENT which will become OpenPKG 2.5 in
four weeks. I'll merge Kolab Server modifications into OpenPKG and
these guys need to test the packages. Needless to say, volunteers
must not expect everything runs smoothly and the responsibility of
their data and availability of services remains with them. It's
not hard to recover from problems if you back up /kolab and it's
often fast and easy to rollback to previous binaries given you
backed them up.

I don't care which platform you run but be aware that OpenPKG 2.5
will most likely to support nineteen combinations of BSD, Linux
and Solaris on AMD64, ia64, ix86 and Sparc [4].

Please note the goal of this procedure is to provide clean and
pristine OpenPKG packages which can be used to deploy Kolab
Server. Ideally the number of diverged packages can be reduced to
zero. We do not attempt to develop or fix Kolab Server code unless
it is related to packaging! Keep this in mind.

Volunteers step up and drop me a personal message! :-) I'll ask
you about the size, usage and technical details [5] of your
existing installation and inquire your commitment for spending
some hours per week on that procedure during the forthcoming four
weeks.

[1] http://www.openpkg.org/flyer.html 
[2] http://www.openpkg.net/document/pr/PR-20050621-foundation.html 
[3] http://max.kde.org:8080/mirrors/ftp.kolab.org/server/development-2.1/current/sources/ 
[4] http://bf.openpkg.net/ see "processing" page
[5] /kolab/bin/openpkg rpm -qi `/kolab/bin/openpkg rpm -qa | sort`

--
Thomas Lotterer, Sponsor of the OpenPKG Project.
Vice President, Director Engineering & Production
and Project Manager OpenPKG 2.5, OpenPKG Foundation e.V.