Kolab 3.2 Debian Packages and Dovecot (was Re: Kolab 3.2 Freebusy)

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 4. March 2014 19.19.13 Paul Boddie wrote:
> 
> As for fixes, it seemed that the libcalendaring package, which causes this
> problem, needed refreshing with later upstream source anyway, and the
> commit history seems to indicate that various things really need
> delivering from recent commits in order to not cause a fair amount of
> misbehaviour (like the pathological reconnect bug that I'd not seen
> before, perhaps due to a change in the method of connecting), so I'm
> probably going to upload some new Debian packages to an unofficial place
> and let people play with them.

I've now made some "3.2 era" packages available here:

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

The selection of reworked and modified packages are here:

http://www.boddie.org.uk/downloads/kolab/2014-03-08/

Any additional packages that might be needed by the above are here:

http://www.boddie.org.uk/downloads/kolab/3.1/

Everything else should be available from the normal Debian archive.

Note that these are all *source* packages, meaning that you need to build them 
for your architecture before installing them. This isn't trivial, but I did 
document the process here:

http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=513

I'll happily give and take advice about making this easier for those who are 
interested. Meanwhile, see "The General Workflow" in the above document. To 
make step #2 less tedious, using wget on the above pages might work better 
than more careful use of dget on the .dsc files, but it's up to you.

The purpose of these packages is to let people see what I've changed in the 
packaging files and what code I'm currently using otherwise, rather than offer 
an alternative source of installable packages that I might then need to 
maintain and support. Just fixing things and keeping up-to-date with upstream 
changes is already too much work for me right now.

> I don't really have the necessary spare time to push changes into OBS,
> sadly, but maybe someone else has the necessary time and patience. My
> Debian packaging repositories are here:
> 
> http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/Kolab/

For a description of recent changes to the packaging, see the following blog 
post:

https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=756

I sincerely believe that this offers a more sustainable approach than the 
"start over from scratch" approach that many of us have needed to adopt to get 
things working on Debian.

> I've also been looking into rejuvenating the Dovecot support - a subject of
> your blog a while ago, Thomas - and testing the metadata plugin that seems
> to be in Ubuntu but not Debian.

I think I have now managed to persuade setup-kolab to configure Dovecot for 
LDAP and general Kolab usage, although the task of supporting administration 
of mailboxes remains. A strategy for populating mailboxes from the webadmin 
interface and/or using the kolab command is required, and I think this may 
involve "master users" in Dovecot, although I'm not sure. Advice is welcome!

Anyway, I hope this is of interest.

Paul