[pkg-ggz-maintainers] More packaging

[Josef Spillner (ggz-travel)]

I've started to work on ggz-java and ggz-community packaging. The java package 
is not that hard and it's basically only included for completeness for now. 
The application will still not run without non-free java but there's not too 
much missing from classpath anymore.

Community is a different beast. What it would need at first is a ggzd-dbi 
package, using the DBI backend of ggzd. It also needs to integrate with many 
other packages. Apparently the packages wwwconfig-common and dbconfig-common 
can help with that but I'm not that happy with the way they work currently. 
Of the external software we include, phpBB is packaged (although I'm not too 
happy with this system), whereas planet is not, for example,

Here's the sort of pseudo-algorithm which I could imagine to guide sysadmins 
to a ready-to-go community setup:

* package software such as planet (there's planet.rb as a substitute, I might 
try it out) - the installation process from source can download such software 
as needed, but for the binary installation all dependencies should exist as 
packages as well

* configure the databases - basically, whatever database (PostgreSQL or MySQL) 
is currently installed can be used for ggzd/community/phpBB. But still the 
sysadmin would want to override that. So debconf would ask for each of the 
database if it's running on the same host or not - and if they do it should 
offer to setup the databases. This is where the db-specific part will start 
so getting the dependencies right might be an issue. Maybe it's easier to 
simply depend on one database - there won't be that many installations 
anyway. The primary advantage I see is to make our (ggz developer's) lifes 
easier when running and migrating servers, which is what we need to do from 
time to time.

* configure the vhost - this should be either a private vhost (for which one 
could add an entry to /etc/hosts - as I do manually for my development 
system), or it is a public host with an already existing hostname in the DNS. 
This distinction is subtle but important for an easy-to-use setup.

Josef

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