[Kolab-devel] Extending Kolab

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> writes:

> On Thursday 03 April 2008 08:57, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
>> > I would maintain that Kolab Server is already pretty "pluggable" due to
>> > its Unix philosophy.
>>
>> Of course any free software can be extended. The relvant question in
>> that context is how much energy it costs the user to actually do
>> that. Usually the free software project itself can try to lower the
>> initial hurdles.
>
> I agree with the general point. My thesis is that Kolab Server already
> makes it comparatively easy because of its design philosophy
> to add additional components. 
> Your point - as I understand it - is more about how to extend 
> the server or its package itself. This is different from being prepared
> to plug in more stuff.
>
>> For the Kolab-Server project I believe we have some dificulties in
>> making it easy to add stuff like munin or greylisting. Adding such
>> extensions would in principle just require adding some configuration
>> files. As such it would be easy to do.
>
> I am unsure how difficult it really is to add greylisting to a Kolab Server 
> installation. We could have more documentation for frequent cases and I 
> believe the wiki helps in this regard.
>
>> But it is far from trivial for a user that would like to contribute
>> back to actually get this added into the Kolab-Server so that other
>> users can test/use this too.
>
> Getting it into the main distribution and should it be in there 
> is often a hard question. In the following you are talking about
> this integration in the core server distribution. There are other
> ways to make it easy for others to try things out.
>
>> I see at least three problems there:
>>
>>  - You'll have to ensure the stuff works on OpenPKG
>>
>>  - You'll have to find a developer to actually care for the addition
>>    so that it finds it way into the CVS system. That is extremely hard
>>    as deleoper time is rare.
>>
>>  - The Kolab-Konsortium needs to support the extension which usually
>>    means that it gets a good deal of testing so that customers don't
>>    come back complaining that things don't work.
>
> All those are very reasonable criteria before something gets
> into the main distribution. Especially maintenance and compliance
> with the rest of the system is critical or we will face a quality problem 
> pretty soon. Kolab Server lives from real world implementations which 
> have high requirements for those topics.
>
>> So in fact adding things like greylisting or munin or something else
>> is pretty hard with the Kolab-Server at the moment. At least if it is
>> something a user would like to share with the community and not just
>> keep for himself.
>
> I suggest to go a different route, e.g.
> a) do a good maintained documentation
> b) we create add-ons for which we can lower the quality criteria

Point b) was what I was aiming at.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> Best,
> Bernhard
>
> -- 
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