kolabd package available in Debian sid

[Jan Schneider]

Hi,

I would like to get Tobias König into the loop, I don't know if he's  
subscribed to the kolab-users mailing list. He has fixed many Kolab  
related bugs recently and probably knows the ins and outs of Horde's  
Kolab support much better than me.

Zitat von Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de>:

> Richard,
>
> On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 03:33:59PM +0200, Richard Bos wrote:
>> > The estimation of many developers is that Horde is probably very hard to
>> > fix because of design problems. Fixing Horde or using different components
>> > will be a lot of work.
>
>> is it possible for you to point out the problems that you see with   
>> respect to
>> horde working together with kolab?  Looking at the bug reports in the horde
>> bugdb (http://bugs.horde.org/ fill in 'kolab' in the summary field), there
>> aren't too many issue's.  Especially not design issue's...
>
> I have had several developers that have deeply looked into the code say
> that they cannot bring Horde as Kolab Client into a stable,   
> maintainable state.

I doubt that, as Tobias' work has proved.

> It supposetly is more inexpensive to write a new webclient.
> I have not a detailed list of technical reasons and it probably
> would be a major piece of work to produce them.

It's hard to discuss technical problems without having details, but  
let's start with what we have:

> What my understanding of the design problems is:
>
> 	a) the use of the database versus Kolab's design of imap folders.
>            It will create almost unsolvable sync issues and hurt stability.
>            And if the code is spread throughout
>            Horde, this will be hard to change.

Horde does not have an inherent database driven design. Quite the  
contrary, it has a driver based design. This made it possible to write  
Kolab drivers for the several applications so quickly. There is this  
DataTree thingy that still causes a lot of headaches because it's the  
last remaining database dependency in Horde, but solutions for this  
problem have already been discussed in the past.

> 	b) Horde needs higher privileges. This is in contrast
> 	   to the Kolab-Webinterface that only works with the
>            priviledges of one user. If true, this would hurt the security.
>            Note that database application are often designed this way,
> 	   Kolab can do differently which is a plus.

I'm not sure if this is true, and I'm wondering if this is really a  
general design issue in that case. I guess it could be solved.

I'm not trying to sell anything, but I really doubt that it makes any  
sense to write a custom web frontend for Kolab, even if it ties much  
better into the server. Horde already provides all features that the  
Kolab server offers, without installing a Kolab server. I would be  
insane to start from scratch instead of ironing the few remaining  
wrinkles out.

Jan.

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