Working the Debian Packaging

Many Kolab "users" (system administrators?) want Debian APT packages for Kolab Groupware, version 2.4 preferably, of course.

Over the past few weeks, different people have mentioned they could volunteer some time to create and maintain packages (needed for testing, eh?) and other people offered to test (the yet not existing packages). However, no packages actually appeared in any repository and no commits to the GIT source code management repositories we use for the packaging were being made.

So, I (an RPM packager) have taken it on - APT packages. A Linux distribution I'm not all too familiar with, a packaging mechanism I'm not all too familiar with, and guidelines and processes and rules I'm completely unaware of.

When I say packaging for Debian feels like a waste of time to me, it's not that I mean it's fruitless - supposedly many people will enjoy the packages - it's that I'm extremely inefficient doing so. Things that are obvious to more experienced APT packagers will cause me to run in a circle a few times, if you know what I mean.

Furthermore, under the misnomer of Getting It Done(TM), I bluntly copy what I have for the RPM side of things, and I ignorantly ignore lintian warnings that probably have a meaning (not necessarily caused by RPM-ishes, BTW).

First on my list was some of my own code (pykolab), until I found out 389 Directory Server isn't available for Debian. Pykolab likes 389 Directory Server very much, as do I myself. They have a permanent lease on a room in the hotel right across the street from where I live, if you will.

Then I found that it is, and that the work on it had started as early as 2005, but that it still is not made available through the standard repositories. Push comes to shove, I rebuilt all the relevant components and we're now shipping it as part of the Kolab 2.4 repositories.

Long story short, it's still a work in progress, but those of you able and/or willing to scrutinize my work; the following is a list of packages for which you should be able to find the corresponding GIT SCM repository at http://git.kolabsys.com/apt/<package-name>

$ wget -q http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/debian/kolab-2.4/dists/squeeze/development/source/Sources.gz -O- | gunzip -c | grep ^Package | awk '{print $2}'
389-admin
389-admin-console
389-adminutil
389-console
389-ds-base
389-ds-console
389-dsgw
cyrus-imapd
idm-console-framework
jss
kolab
ldapjdk
libapache2-mod-nss
libmozilla-ldap-perl
openldap
pykolab
svrcore