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

[Chris Weiss]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 3:25 AM, Olivier Berger
<address@hidden> wrote:
>  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.

while I generally agree with this concept, in practice deb packaging
doesn't work for web applications, especially ones as complex as
phpgw.

Even for simpler packages, such as phpmyadmin and cacti, unless you
have the most basic single site apache configuration you end having to
do lots of manual apache config editing to make it work correctly.  I
find it much easier to just install from a tarball.

With our complexity, deb packaging actually adds confusion.  questions
I've seen:  where's the header.inc.php?  why isn't the the database
created?  what's the admin login?  what do you mean I have to set it
up, I installed the deb!

of course, since we can't use cvs for updates anymore, packaging is
now more important in order to keep updates manageable, but unless the
above issues can be addressed, packages will always be an overall
failure.