[pkg-horde] sed substitutions in debian/rules for Horde module packages

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 01:04:39PM +0100, Gregory Colpart wrote:
> Hello,

> First post on this mailing-list :)

Hello! I was about to invite you over here after seeing your ITP. As
you may have seen, we are not fully set up yet; that's mainly my
fault, but as I'm sick right now I lack the energy to do much.

So, would you consider joining the team and having horde-sam be a
package handled by the team? That last sentence is a bit confusingly
written, so let me explain how we intend to work: We really, really
want to avoid the situation where packages are maintained by an
egalitarian team where everybody is responsible of everything and thus
everybody relies on the others to do the job and thus nothing
happens. So we want every package to have one "real" maintainer who
feels responsible for it; the others in the team *can* help out and do
uploads. The team is (in my mind) mostly a safety net for when the
main maintainer is in VAC, over-busy or otherwise unavailable. In the
case of horde-sam, that one maintainer would naturally be you.

At my insistence, we intend to have a VCS repository for the
packages. It will be a GNU Arch (tla) repository on
arch.debian.org. I'll create the repository as soon as I get the
energy to work a bit again.

Technically, we intend to put this mailing list in the "Maintainer:"
field and people in "Uploaders:"; this is the easiest way to guarantee
that everyone stays up to date on what happens with the packages (bug
reports, ...).


Last, but not least: I can't find you on https://db.debian.org/ , are
you a Debian Developer? If not, do you already have a sponsor for
horde-sam?

> In debian/rules of horde module packages (horde3, imp4,
> ingo1, etc.), there are several sed substitutions (in install rule).
> The goal of this sed substitutions seems to remplace PHP lines
> like :
> 
> @define('HORDE_BASE', dirname(__FILE__) . '/../..');
> 
> to :
> 
> @define('HORDE_BASE', '/usr/share/horde3');
> 
> I'm curious, what is the reason to do that ?

Horde is meant to be installed all in one directory (tree), but this
conflicts with the FHS, and thus the Debian policy. So the Debian
packages put things where the FHS mandates and put up compatibility
symlinks. The horde code, however, assumes that it can take the name
of the current file, go up a few levels (two in the case you cite) and
it will find the horde installation directory (root of the tree). This
assumption is broken by debian (e.g. a file in /etc/horde/horde3 will
think the horde root it /etc/ in this fashion, while it is
/usr/share/horde3). So we hard-code the right root so that everything
still works.

-- 
Lionel