[Kolab-devel] Fedora packaging

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 23. January 2014 14.10.25 Erik M Jacobs wrote:
> 
> I think part of the issue is that there is no one willing to step up and
> sign up to package Kolab for Fedora.  There is a lot required and,
> generally, it seems that Kolab's RPM packages don't fit the Fedora
> guidelines.  It would take a lot of work.

I think the "upstream-appropriate" packaging situation is similar for Fedora 
to that of the packaging for Debian: one can make something in the right 
format that installs, but there are lots of things that will not satisfy the 
policy of those distributions.

> Perhaps you and I can work together on it?

Although concrete decisions related to policy may differ somewhat, there might 
be some benefit at looking at plans for Debian and perhaps openSUSE, too. I 
haven't really looked at the Debian packaging much since December, but I did 
write up an approach that kept setup-kolab and made it work slightly better 
with the way packages are installed and configured in Debian, and it is 
conceivable that Fedora behaves similarly enough that the general dependency 
structure and approach is at the very least worth looking at:

http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=623

I put some Debian packages related to this work in the following place:

http://www.boddie.org.uk/downloads/kolab/

From what I understand of the discussion about this in December, things like 
setup-kolab are not exactly what one would normally expect in Debian, but at 
the same time there is surely a benefit to not have to do the configuration 
work from scratch every time someone wants to support a distribution: setup-
kolab surely does useful enough work in most situations and can at least serve 
as the template for whatever gets deployed on a distribution, but it's easier 
to keep it around and make it do the right thing, which shouldn't be too hard 
despite distributions wanting to call services different names and other such 
annoying but relatively trivial stuff.

The other sticking point appeared to be delivering Kolab to work with the 
official distribution packages for things like cyrus-imapd and roundcube (on 
Debian, at least) where there may need to be some improvements from unofficial 
packages ported over to the official ones.

Paul