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

[Olivier Berger]

Le jeudi 14 février 2008 à 08:33 -0600, Chris Weiss a écrit :
> 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.
> 

I agree that there are issues at the moment, since the
installation/administration requires the administrator to use the web
interface. Having something fully scriptable would be better.

See my previous rant on the subject :
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/phpgroupware-developers/2007-05/msg00010.html

IMHO, it would be great it there was better interaction between the
setup system and command-line, i.e. APIs allowing the configuration of
phpGW without the use of the PHP Web interface as is at the moment.

If someone was to work on improving the setup process in such a way, the
work of the packagers would be definitely eased.

In the meantime, phpGW *can* be (was) packaged anyway, even if it's just
for basic testing, leaving heavy production setups to be
installed/configured manually...

Still, the packages were there and mostly working, despite the
annoyances that you described... and no longer will be...

RIP phpGW ;)

Best regards,
-- 
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