[Pkg-sql-ledger-discussion] Status Update: ledgersmb

[Elizabeth Bevilacqua]

Hey everyone,

If you're subscribed to the svn commits you've seen my commits trickle
in over the past couple months.

In the course of building and testing this package, I discovered that
ledgersmb does not yet support Postgres 8.3. The ledgersmb team has
started addressing this issue, and have solved several issues in their
.13 release but I'm not confident this is going to be completely
resolved by the time Lenny goes through the process of being frozen
and readied for release over these next several months - and Lenny is
only shipping with 8.3. This is troublesome, and makes the possibility
of ledgersmb being included in the next stable release rather slim.

I finally got to a point where I snagged a DD and we reviewed the
package. He had several concerns about the package getting into Debian
(the 8.3 issue was a big one), but also high on the list is the
release cycle for this application. Currently ledgersmb is being
heavily developed, with releases every 2 months or so. If ledgersmb
was to get into stable we'd be stuck supporting one of these "every
two month" releases and backporting all security patches for it for 3
years. This is not something I alone have time for, especially as the
project matures quickly beyond being much like one of today's
releases, and I'm not confident we have enough of a team here to help
me as much as I'll need.

So the proposal was made to host this as an Aloith project - uploading
our .deb files for each release of LedgerSMB in Aloith rather than
actually including it in Debian. This will allow for significant
developement of the package (including finally getting around to
adding more autoconfiguration for apache2 and postgresql) after the
inital release - so I can get *something* out quickly, I need this
package - and loosen the policy issues surrounding inclusion in Debian
itself immediately (certainly we do want everything cleaned up
eventually).

Unless people have objections, I'm going to move forward with this
idea. Naturally at any time if we change our mind, it'll be trivial to
move the Alioth .deb into Debian unstable.

I also am going to try to snag a few more people to work on this, so I
took advantage of the project webspace and gathered our resources so
it's easier for folks to get involved:

http://pkg-sql-ledger.alioth.debian.org/ledgersmb/

Cheers,

Lyz

-- 
Elizabeth Bevilacqua
http://www.princessleia.com