[Kolab-devel] XMPP and more packaging experimentation

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

As those of you following Planet Kolab may have seen, I recently wrote up some 
vague experiences with ejabberd, Converse(.js), Roundcube and Kolab:

http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=741

There isn't much specific detail in that article, but it does indicate that 
there's a slightly complicated dance involving an XMPP server, the LDAP 
server, Converse, and Apache.

Alongside this, I've been thinking about how tightly coupled the different 
services have been in the existing Debian packaging, and I imagine that the 
situation is largely the same for other distributions.

So I decided to experiment with making a "kolab-minimal" metapackage which 
only includes the Web-based components plus the command line tools and kolabd. 
I'll admit that it's hard to know where best to draw the line, but I started 
out with the realisation that LDAP might very well be provided by a separate 
server or infrastructure, and then I wondered whether the IMAP and SMTP parts 
wouldn't also be provided separately, too.

I'm not claiming that putting things on different machines is necessarily a 
great idea, and I'm not advocating doing this from a load distribution 
perspective (and I'm sure that there are other ways of distributing workloads 
that I have not yet considered, anyway). Instead, from a packaging and 
configuration perspective, I think there are some things that perhaps get 
tested in interesting but valid ways by separating the different components 
out that might not otherwise get tested in an "all on one machine" 
environment.

To this end, I've made my own packaging repositories available at the 
following location:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/Kolab/

There's more work to be done, and the pykolab work to support this is still 
pending integration with upstream, but I thought that someone might find these 
ideas interesting enough to comment on them.

Paul