FYI, I have raised (copy bellow) the subject on phpGroupware project's developpers list (probably archived at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/phpgroupware-developers/2008-02/msg00022.html in a while)
This may help reach a team of interested people for collaborative maintenance effort. Hope this helps, -------- Message transféré -------- De: Olivier Berger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Répondre à: [EMAIL PROTECTED] À: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: Christian BAC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sujet: [phpGroupWare-developers] Status of the Debian packaging of phpGroupware Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:25:02 +0100 Hello. You may have noticed that the phpGroupware packages have been removed from the Debian distribution recently. That means that if the current situation is lasting, they will not be present in the future stable release of Debian. That would obviously be bad for the phpGroupware project, as Debian is one of the best "proxy" of the whole libre software environment : having a package in Debian is probably critical to the success of any project. This removal was the consequence of the non-responsiveness of the Debian maintainer, if I get it right, mostly in case of security advisories issued about phpGroupware or included "applications". But being a Debian maintainer is volunteer work, so I won't blame the maintainer, he must have better things to do, and that's common situation in libre software. So the situation now is to try and find if people are interested in packaging phpGroupware for Debian, or not ? If so, would they organize to work in a collaborative way to get things done ? Maybe there are technical options to discuss, for instance as to which parts must be packaged, or not, etc. I'm raising my concerns here as it seems that this has been discussed privately only (between Dave, us, others in the project, some Debian folks too), but I think that this should be discussed in the public if possible, mainly to investigate options for collaborative maintainance of the Debian packages (through the Debian forge alioth maybe ?). We (the PicoForge team at Institut TELECOM, which was formerly known as GET/INT, btw) have moderate interest in investing lots of resources and effort in packaging the whole of phpGroupware. Still we have PicoForge packaging for Debian relying on phpGroupware packages (at least the core, api, admin, etc. over MySQL, apache, OpenLDAP only). Obviously we have some skills to help, but not a lot of availability. I've already filed a RFP (Request for Packaging) for Debian at : http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464014 that didn't attract much interest (but Dave or Christian's ;), but that doesn't mean no one cares. We (mainly Christian, sorry to speak in his place) volunteer to do some work, but we aren't sure we can test all possible options for installing phpGroupware, so we may not do the full job of packaging the whole of it for Debian for every combinations of DB of Web server, nor for all phpGroupware applications. Will others volunteer too ? Can we hope to get some feedback from the former maintainer (Andrew Mitchell) to help pass the knowledge to other volunteers (or still share some of the effort) ? I would understand that most phpGroupware developpers wouldn't care, thinking that it's Debian stuff and they don't care about downstream packaging... but it would be an error IMHO, as a project which isn't packaged can't be appealing to any serious business (although packages may not suit all situations, of course). I hope that we can progress to a situation where efforts for such packaging help also the project, for instance in isolating areas where effort must be primarily put, issueing 0.9.18 (at last ! ? ;), improving the dynamics of the project, and so on. Thanks in advance for your feedback. P.S.: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=453467 has a thread about the removal of the packages for the curious ones. -- Olivier BERGER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (*NEW ADDRESS*) http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~olberger/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut TELECOM / TELECOM & Management SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry
