[Kolab-devel] Fedora packaging

[Karel Volný]

Hi,

as this is my first post here, let me introduce a bit -
My name is Karel Volný, and I work as quality assuarance engineer at Red Hat, Brno, Czech Republic. As a sideprojects I'm doing some translations and Fedora/EPEL packaging. The latter brings me here ...

Recently, I have tried to set up Kolab on one of my machines, and while trying to fight the issues, I just had to say to myself stop, and try to do that systematically, to the benefit of other users and not just to hack my system.

So, the first thing I wonder about is why Kolab is not in the distribution repositories of Fedora?

I can understand some benefits from the developers' side, but as an user, I'd prefer not having to mess with external repositories. For example, right now there is a real problem with it that Fedora 20 got released about a month ago, yet the install guide refers to F18 and F19 only, and there doesn't seem to be anything newer in OBS.

While I don't want to just come here and say "leave OBS, move to Fedora proper!", I'd like to know -

* what are the exact benefits for the Kolab upstream to release own rpm packages, instead of releasing only sources and leaving upon distributions to pack them (while there doesn't have to be any gap in between upstream and the distribution, same people could do the job, I know for example Jeroen maintained *a lot* of Fedora packages ...)

* what are the possible reasons for not including Kolab in Fedora proper - license issues, whatever ...

As I see four review requests opened in Red Hat's Bugzilla for Kolab components, I suppose the idea of having Kolab in Fedora is not considered bad, but there isn't enough manpower?

I'm willing to help in that case; if an effort to get Kolab into Fedora proper already started, could someone give me pointers where I could be most useful?

K.

-- 
Karel Volný
QE BaseOs/Daemons Team
Red Hat Czech, Brno
tel. +420 532294274
(RH: +420 532294111 ext. 8262074)
xmpp kavol at jabber.cz
:: "Never attribute to malice what can
::  easily be explained by stupidity."