[Calendarserver-discuss] imip-agent and related component integration (was Re: Free Software calendaring and groupware (in and beyond Debian))

[Paul Boddie]

On Saturday 9. April 2016 00.21.49 Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Paul Boddie (2016-04-08 22:43:57)
> 
> > There would be parameterisation required to make some of the mail
> > configuration files, and that might well involve interaction with the
> > administrator. I don't have a problem making simple command line tools
> > to help with this as they could always be invoked by debconf. I've
> > tried to make standalone tools (in the tools directory) for common
> > tasks.
> 
> I suggest you spend time on evolving your project instead of on writing
> wrapper tools for Debian integration.  I and others can easier work on
> integration, your time is best spent on evolving your nice code!

I've now added a simple tool to the imip-agent repository to perform the 
customisation of configuration files that are provided for other components on 
a system, those with which imip-agent is likely to be integrated. Some details 
can be found here:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/imip-agent/file/0f4dbb14ce2a/conf/configure.example

The above file contains a set of definitions that reflects the outcome of 
decisions made when figuring out how to integrate imip-agent with things like 
Apache, Exim or Postfix, Cyrus or Dovecot. It gets read by a script:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/imip-
agent/file/0f4dbb14ce2a/conf/tools/configure.sh

This script substitutes the definitions (plus computed values) and produces a 
parallel collection of the original configuration file templates.

Currently, nothing else is done with the resulting files, and I don't think 
anything should be done with them with regard to deploying them, but I may 
well add information about where such files might end up. Experts will, of 
course, know where to put, say, Exim router and transport configuration files, 
but it might be helpful to indicate the purpose of such files and where they 
could end up to administrators who don't want to have to read such files (and 
maybe the documentation) to figure out what they are and where they should go.

As I noted before, this tool also helps to document and formalise functional 
integration mechanisms and is useful for testing. Indeed, I was developing 
something similar for Kolab before I shifted my attention to imip-agent, so 
similar systems could easily employ something like this if that were of 
interest to them.

Paul