[phpGroupWare-developers] Status of the Debian packaging of phpGroupware

[Olivier Berger]

Hello.

You may have noticed that the phpGroupware packages have been removed
from the Debian distribution recently. That means that if the current
situation is lasting, they will not be present in the future stable
release of Debian.

That would obviously be bad for the phpGroupware project, as Debian is
one of the best "proxy" of the whole libre software environment : having
a package in Debian is probably critical to the success of any project.


This removal was the consequence of the non-responsiveness of the Debian
maintainer, if I get it right, mostly in case of security advisories
issued about phpGroupware or included "applications".
But being a Debian maintainer is volunteer work, so I won't blame the
maintainer, he must have better things to do, and that's common
situation in libre software.

So the situation now is to try and find if people are interested in
packaging phpGroupware for Debian, or not ?

If so, would they organize to work in a collaborative way to get things
done ?

Maybe there are technical options to discuss, for instance as to which
parts must be packaged, or not, etc.


I'm raising my concerns here as it seems that this has been discussed
privately only (between Dave, us, others in the project, some Debian
folks too), but I think that this should be discussed in the public if
possible, mainly to investigate options for collaborative maintainance
of the Debian packages (through the Debian forge alioth maybe ?).


We (the PicoForge team at Institut TELECOM, which was formerly known as
GET/INT, btw) have moderate interest in investing lots of resources and
effort in packaging the whole of phpGroupware. 
Still we have PicoForge packaging for Debian relying on phpGroupware
packages (at least the core, api, admin, etc. over MySQL, apache,
OpenLDAP only). Obviously we have some skills to help, but not a lot of
availability.
I've already filed a RFP (Request for Packaging) for Debian at :
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464014 that didn't
attract much interest (but Dave or Christian's ;), but that doesn't mean
no one cares.

We (mainly Christian, sorry to speak in his place) volunteer to do some
work, but we aren't sure we can test all possible options for installing
phpGroupware, so we may not do the full job of packaging the whole of it
for Debian for every combinations of DB of Web server, nor for all
phpGroupware applications.

Will others volunteer too ?

Can we hope to get some feedback from the former maintainer (Andrew
Mitchell) to help pass the knowledge to other volunteers (or still share
some of the effort) ?

I would understand that most phpGroupware developpers wouldn't care,
thinking that it's Debian stuff and they don't care about downstream
packaging... but it would be an error IMHO, as a project which isn't
packaged can't be appealing to any serious business (although packages
may not suit all situations, of course).
I hope that we can progress to a situation where efforts for such
packaging help also the project, for instance in isolating areas where
effort must be primarily put, issueing 0.9.18 (at last ! ? ;), improving
the dynamics of the project, and so on.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

P.S.: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=453467 has a
thread about the removal of the packages for the curious ones.
-- 
Olivier BERGER <address@hidden> (*NEW ADDRESS*)
http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~olberger/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM / TELECOM & Management SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), 
Evry