[pkg-kolab] mod-php vs php-fpm.

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 27. March 2014 19.03.18 Diane Trout wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In my experiments building some of the roundcube & kolab components
> ( http://ghic.org/~diane/bottom-up-kolab.html )

That's a very convenient summary and your remarks about dismantling the 
dependency stack will certainly motivate me to try and offer a choice of 
components at each level, although there will probably always be the need for 
some IMAP server, some LDAP server, some MTA, because otherwise it wouldn't be 
Kolab, I suppose.

Particularly the LDAP changes you've been making will be useful in supporting 
OpenLDAP properly: currently, without an eligible 389-ds dependency, Kolab 
won't configure itself properly using setup-kolab, although I did add "remote 
server" options for LDAP (and IMAP) that mitigates this.

> I modified some of the packages to depend on php5 | php5-fpm
> 
> The biggest problem I ran into for doing that was that chwala has some
> .htaccess files in public_html and public_html/api and if you don't have
> mod- php loaded apache can't parse them.
> 
> At least when using php5-fpm it looks like you can rename the .htaccess
> files to .user.ini.
> ( http://php.net/manual/en/configuration.file.per-user.php )
> 
> Unfortunately the documentation seems to suggest .user.ini files won't work
> with mod-php. I don't know much about packaging php code, so I don't know
> if its reasonable to try and support both environments in official
> packages.
> 
> It does look like php5-fpm does have the advantage it can work with nginx
> in addition to apache worker. While mod-php can only work with apache
> prefork.

I tend to keep PHP at arm's length, so it's interesting to hear of somebody 
else's informed experiences with it. :-)

Meanwhile, my own progress report involves Postfix wrangling and getting 
shared folders and resources working again. There's also some movement 
upstream in this respect, but I can imagine pushing out another pykolab source 
package with fixes pretty soon.

Paul