[Kolab-devel] current state/future of debian packages ?

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 14. January 2015 10.10.06 Matthias Busch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> what is the current state of the kolab debian packages?
> 
> As far as I know they are being maintained by voluenteers of the community.
> but who?

The mailing list for "proper" Debian integration is the pkg-kolab list:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-kolab-devel

> I recently saw the blog post by paul boddie (dated 2014-12-19) which
> talks about debian packages but seems to be about integrating 3rd party
> products with kolab - as well as the work on it being halted.

Obviously, that refers to my own efforts and not to anyone else's, but I don't 
see a great deal of activity around getting packages into Debian itself. The 
library packages may be there in a fairly recent form:

https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/libkolabxml
https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/libkolab

I know that there were discussions about conflicts with KDE packages where a 
compromise was eventually reached, potentially letting the remaining low-level 
library packages (libcalendaring comes to mind) into the Debian archive.

But other fundamental components are unpackaged, mostly because they need work 
to be considered acceptable for Debian, as opposed to being .deb files that 
you can install and which may or may not work as you might expect. Things like 
integration with debconf (the Debian configuration system) need considering 
for "proper" packages, and metadata such as copyright and licensing 
information needs to be thoroughly prepared.

Paul Klos did a lot of work on getting the OBS packages into a reasonable and 
generally functional state, but work remains before they could be delivered 
via the official Debian channels. There are other matters that make the 
situation difficult, such as the unavailability of dependencies in appropriate 
versions in the Debian archive. Obviously, you can get all your dependencies 
from OBS, but then you may experience conflicts with the official Debian 
packages (which were rather severe when I first looked at Kolab).

As for third party products, I think I mostly mentioned integration with XMPP, 
which I think is still a topic of interest for the Kolab developers, as well 
as the use of alternative components such as Dovecot, which is purely a matter 
of broadening the interoperability/compatibility of the software. I also 
mentioned the use of Kolab against existing infrastructure components. 
Configuring all this stuff is straightforward enough if you know what to do, 
but integrating this configuration work into the existing packages in a nice 
way ended up involving too many workarounds. My blog post covers this 
adequately, I think.

Paul