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

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

On 2015-01-20 10:08, Timotheus Pokorra wrote:
> Hello Matthias,
> 
>> personally I am waiting for a few updates to make it onto my kolab
>> installation. so far the whole process of how the patches and updates
>> in sources get magically turned apt-get upgrade results is still
>> somewhat eluding me.
> 
> On IRC, Jeroen

That's me!

> explained it like to this (in my own words):
> The people at Kolab Systems work on Kolab:Development, which is
> available to the community.

Kolab Systems has two priorities here: the next Kolab release (current 
Kolab:Development), and the current Kolab Enterprise releases. Some of 
the people also contributing to Kolab:Development packaging at least 
will have noticed we continuously update APT *and* RPM packaging where 
we find fixes can be applied -- and they will also have noticed we don't 
push them to Kolab:3.3:Updates.

I think we have largely enabled a process for a community to be 
autonomous in supporting itself -- everything goes in to Bugzilla, git 
repositories are public (visible) and open (pretty liberal attitude 
toward allowing commit access), packaging is public (visible) and open 
(pretty liberal attitude toward allowing push access to 
Kolab:$x.$y:Updates), releases are pretty much standard (every 6 months, 
time-based not feature-based).

Shortly after a Kolab 3.4 will have happened, I myself and others will 
be fixing stuff like crazy, and get those fixes in to Kolab:3.4 
sometimes, to get it to install and setup correctly (some people forget 
to configure the updates repository).

> Kolab Systems have their own Enterprise branch, where they apply
> patches from Kolab:Development.
> The enterprise branch is obviously private.
> 

A few examples to show why, in case it wasn't obvious already:

   - Our customers are more likely to have >= 1000 entries in their LDAP 
directories (than you are), for which (in the context of administration, 
a global address books, and auto-completion) we recommend using Virtual 
List View control. We ship a patch against PHP (submitted upstream, see 
[1]) to fully support Virtual List View control responses from LDAP 
(basically, the "count").

     This means that enterprise customers (on selected platforms) get a 
patched version of PHP, making the distributor (Kolab Systems) 
responsible for (security) updates.

     The Kolab community however cannot reasonably (should not) be made 
responsible for such security updates, aside from the fact it is 
generally considered a no-no for third-party repositories to override 
base system packages already included in the distribution like that. An 
enterprise distributor with an enterprise customer under a very 
enterprisey contract however can do this. It is also not very common for 
a community consumer to have >= entries in their LDAP and require global 
address book and auto-complete responses to be <= 2ms.

   - Our customers are likely interested in high-availability, 
load-balancing (through high-availability), SSL-offloading, scalable 
storage and configuration management, among other things. To such end, 
Kolab Systems can ship updated versions of, or otherwise make available, 
software like keepalived, httpd, nginx, haproxy, glusterfs, puppet, and 
such more.

The Kolab community however should not necessarily make itself 
responsible for all this, but --if so desired-- instead look at their 
distribution of choice to include such versions or such software in to 
the stock distribution repositories, so that their benefits become 
available to all, not just Kolab consumers.

> The process to get fixes into Kolab:Updates is to add a request on OBS.
> This request will be reviewed by members of the community, and
> hopefully accepted.
> see https://obs.kolabsys.com/group/show/kolab-developers
> These people have permissions to integrate stuff in Kolab:Updates.
> 

While everyone who registers has permissions to branch off and submit 
for approval!

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

[1] https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=62853

-- 
Systems Architect, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
m: +41 79 951 9003
w: https://kolabsystems.com

pgp: 9342 BF08