Some library and packaging advice please?

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Wednesday 28 May 2008 21:24, Ben Scott wrote:
>   According to the Kolab web site, they've got their own binary
> packages available for Debian 3.1.  Have you tried those?  Or is that
> not the Debian release you're using?

I can't get their Debian-pre-compiled ones to install - the install script 
expects to find the SRPMs.  That said, I see no reason to believe those are 
different from compiling the SRPMs on a Debian system.

>   Wow.  That's... um... that's... interesting.  All the drawbacks of
> pre-packaged software, with all the drawbacks of building from source,
> and all the drawbacks of static linking with all the drawbacks of
> dynamic linking.  Are you sure OpenPKG isn't really a plot by
> Microsoft to make *nix software look bad?

For what it's worth, I can see OpenPKG being useful for creating software that 
can work in a black-box environment.  If I were just going to install it and 
forget it, then it would work exactly as they say and it would work pretty 
effortlessly on any Unix-like distribution and likely even non-Linux ones.  
But once you tack on the administrative environment around it to manage and 
monitor the server, that becomes painful.

>   SRPMs are just an archive of source packages, optional source
> patches, and a control file (the .spec).  The spec file's %prep and
> %build sections detail the commands needed to unpack the sources,
> patch them, configure them, and build them.  You should be able to
> unpack the SRPM and look at the spec file to extract the build
> sequence, and then build a properly integrated binary against that.
> It looks like they're using configure, so you might even be able to
> just use standard options for everything.  (Although it wouldn't
> surprise me to hear they've got hard-coded paths in their source, if
> they're using such a brain-damaged package system.)

They haven't hard-coded paths into the source, from what I've seen, and if 
they do, it would be in a patch file also in the SRPM that is applied with 
the .spec files.  So it should be easy enough to root out.

>   From what I can see, there don't appear to be many original packages
> in the Kolab distribution -- it's mostly third-party stuff they're
> including for dependencies.  So, if you apt-get all the dependencies
> from the Debian repository, you'll hopefully only have to do that for
> a couple of Kolab-original packages.

Today, I am going to contact the Debian Kolab maintainers.  That basically 
amounts to doing what they do, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll see 
what progress they've made on the latest release of Kolab and offer some 
help.  Maybe they've already done all the heavy lifting and just haven't told 
anyone. ;-)
-N