[Kolab-devel] Proposal - Distro specific changes for Kolab 3

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

On 2013-05-22 15:36, Aeneas Jaißle wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 

Hi Aeneas,

> I'd like to enhance Kolab's distribution support and make live for
> (us) packagers easier.
> 
> For that, I put a layer between paths, service names, user and groups
> (= between all that could differ on another distribution).
> 
> (...snip...)
> 
> Is something like this wanted upstream? Would this be the rights way
> to do (in python)? Feedback welcome!
> 

This is not a bad idea, but I hope you appreciate the following 
considerations;

It is dangerously close to the list of settings that Kolab used to ship 
as part of its kolab.conf.

We have found such lists to become problematic if (when) distributions 
change their ways. "settings_fedora.py" would then need to become 
"settings_for_fedora_before_version_16.py" and 
"settings_for_fedora_after_and_with_version_17.py", if you will.

I would rather consider using "adaptive" code - surely we can test 
whether a system uses systemctl, service or update-rc.d, and whether a 
service name is httpd or apache2. While the current "implementation" [1] 
is rather rudimentary, I would say a couple of if/else clauses could be 
sufficient.

It is a good idea to pull such if/else clauses out of the respective 
setup_*.py scripts, and perhaps make them some sort of utils.service() 
function.

Furthermore, in packaging we have ./configure with options, and 
pykolab/constants.py.in. It is probably better/easier to ./configure 
--with-service-mechanism=systemctl than it is to maintain a list of 
distributions and versions.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

[1] 
https://git.kolab.org/pykolab/tree/pykolab/setup/setup_roundcube.py#n196

-- 
Systems Architect, Kolab Systems AG

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