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

[Dave Hall]

Bonjour Olivier,

Sorry for the lag in replying to this - I took the weekend off, then got
side tracked.

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 10:25 +0100, Olivier Berger wrote: 
> 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.

This was a shock and disappointment :(

> 
> 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.

I think for web applications it is a little different than compiled
binaries.  Either way, phpGW not being bindled by a distro is a loss.
We should be looking to get packages back into Fedora (we used to have
RH rpms) and Mandriva (missing since 0.9.14) and openSUSE (never
included AFAIK).  Sorry for adding some feature creep already ;)

Maybe we can look at using the openSUSE packaging infrastructure, it
will allow us to build for many distros at once.  The political
limitations may be Debian's policies and people's views on using
resources donated by Novell.

<snip />

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

I think that once released 0.9.18 could be packaged a little differently
to 0.9.16.  0.9.18 will probably use a new release model, if I ever get
time to get infrastructure setup for it.

Packages will have one of 4 stati:

Core - the core modules which should be installed for all installs

Maintained - actively maintained and developed modules, should also be
mature

Supported - gets security and critical bug fixes - best effort response

Orphaned - use at own risk

There may also be a incubator modules for new modules under development

I think we should have 1 deb for the core and separate debs for each of
the maintained modules, IMHO including supported modules should be
discussed further.

> 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 ?).

I don't think that you can get much more public than the debian bts ;)

> 
> 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.

I think working together to improve the packaging of phpgw and the
relationship between phpgw and PL are important for both projects.  I
too have limited availability, but I will try to help where I can.

> 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.

I think we should should the following combinations:

* Current version of PHP in testing

* MySQL and pgsql db backends

* LDAP and SQL accounts

There is other combinations that the project may officially support, but
the supported configurations we offer to official Debain deb users can
be a subset of the broader feature set.

> 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 will try to call him again tomorrow my time and talk to him about things.

> 
> 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).

You would be surprised, about half of the active contributors to the
project use debian, closely followed by Mandriva.

> 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.

0.9.18 is getting closer.  In order to get a release out the door there
are a few hurldes yet to clear.  AFAIK everyone is working on getting
trunk released as spare time projects - so it will be a like a debian
release it will be released when it is ready :)

Cheers

Dave