[pkg-horde] Horde4 packages

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hello list!

Mathieu Parent directed me to this group as I'm currently pondering on  
how to build Horde4 packages.

Let me give you a short introduction concerning myself: I have been  
Horde developer for several years now and I am responsible for the  
bridge between Horde and the Kolab groupware server. For Horde3 this  
integration turned out to be quite a hack for several reasons. I'm  
aiming at improving this code significantly for Horde4 (which is  
currently in preparation). At the same time I would like to see  
packages for this as early as possible.

For Debian I would like to be able to:

  - ensure that Horde4 can be installed without problems
  - ensure that getting Horde4 up and running on an SQL backend is as easy
    as possible
  - ensure that getting Horde4 up and running on a Kolab backend is as easy
    as possible

At the moment I'm not much of a Debian packager which is why I contact  
you here. I have packaging experience from being a Gentoo maintainer  
and I did the RPM packages for the Kolab server. So maybe I can be  
kind of an interface between you and the Horde developer crowd.

For Horde4 one of the areas I have been busy with was PEAR packaging.  
Not because I love PEAR that much but it seems to be the only  
reasonable packaging solution for PHP at the moment. And I do love  
decent packaging.

In principle it would probably still be possible to package Horde4 as  
one base package (that include the framework) and the Horde  
applications. But I'd be happy to see the base application being split  
up into the different framework components and the horde base. The  
applications would remain as they are. Both release models will be  
supported by the Horde team for Horde4. Would you see the high number  
of resulting packages when splitting the framework as a problem?

Packaging should in fact be near to trivial. The continuous  
integration system I set up for horde (http://ci.horde.org) includes  
packaging + dependencies into the various builds. If the dependencies  
the Horde developers note in the package.xml files are incorrect the  
likelihood that the build is failing is high.

Consequently it was quite easy to get a small script that snapshots a  
Horde module from git and prepares it as an RPM package for the kolab  
server. This is also automated at http://dev2.pardus.de:8080

At the moment I'd like to get something similar set up for Debian. I  
just don't know what the best way of getting there would be. If  
possible it should involve the Debian horde hackers as early as  
possible so that you can take an early look and may comment if things  
are going into the wrong direction.

Thanks!

Gunnar

-- 
____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _

E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
Tel.   : +49 700 6245 0000                         Bundesstrasse 29
Fax    : +49 721 1513 52322                        D-20146 Hamburg
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