[Kolab-devel] On the road to Kolab 3.0

[Georg C. F. Greve]

On Sunday 11 December 2011 22.41:15 Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> Can you clarify on those "shortcomings"?

You know most of those yourself, in the end.

OpenPKG essentially requires to maintain a complete operating system in a 
single stack that is installed in parallel to the existing one. That has a 
whole set of implications which have proven painful in the past.

One of them is that some updates that ought to be simple have knock-on effects 
in various other components, creating a flurry of changes that goes from 
component to component, each time requiring a test cycle.

And a lot of this is on top of the rule of thumb that an OpenPKG release 
process takes around two weeks, which was initially come up with by 
Intevation, and which Kolab Systems also ran into.

As Roundcube is based on a newer version of PHP than that in the 2.3 series, 
we are likely to have more of those issues, not less. So something in the 
range of 4-6 weeks until release seems more likely.

That would then give us a release on a deprecated packaging system that is 
going to be phased out with the next minor or major release, as discussed some 
time ago on this list. So the effort would be pointless around 6-8 weeks after 
the release was out.

This is quite a bit of effort for very little gain.

Plus all of that without a single supported customer in the chain to justify 
the cost of pulling an employee out of the development process for all the 
things that are going on, slowing down the development for everyone else.

So it's not something I can agree to.

That said: You or anyone else are of course welcome to take over the task of 
providing another release on the 2.3.* branch with Roundcube based on OpenPKG, 
we'd definitely point you in the right directions and help you in any way we 
can.

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve
Chief Executive Officer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: greve at kolabsys.com
t: +41 78 904 43 33
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve