[Pkg-giraffe-discuss] tracking of changes done by Kopano Upstream

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hello Mark,

as you have written in another email kopanocore 8.6.0 has some new or
changed feature which are not fully finalized I wanted to bring this a
bit more up. Release 8.6.0 was in some circumstances uncomfortable to me
and had side some effects while packaging and also after uploading to
the archive. Not that dramatic but a bit nasty.

Free time for packaging that big thing kopanocore is costs always
precious time as we are mainly only two persons which working on kopano
related packages so I was thinking about how we can improve the
situation here.

We will need some better communication about what Kopano is planning to
include as new, changed or removed features in which release otherwise
it really takes to much time in a longterm to keep tracking all of this.
Packages provided by Kopano and Debian will divide unnecessarily away to
much much from each other. These costs have to be payed first by the
users, something which isn't nice.

Kopano itself is now providing some Python3 based packages for 8.6.x.
Also some more tools like the spamd or storeadm. It has taken pretty
much time on my side to sort out the new things which are now installed.
And also some time to decide into which package I should integrate the
new files. There are also some extra new files in /u/sbin which have
some additional file extension to mark the as Python files which are
also installed as (php) shell script. For example:

> usr/sbin/kopano-mr-accept.py: Python script, ASCII text executable
> root at i5:/tmp/buildd/kopanocore-8.6.1/debian/tmp# file usr/sbin/kopano-mr*
> usr/sbin/kopano-mr-accept:     a /usr/bin/php script, ASCII text executable
> usr/sbin/kopano-mr-accept.py:  Python script, ASCII text executable
> usr/sbin/kopano-mr-process:    a /usr/bin/php script, ASCII text executable
> usr/sbin/kopano-mr-process.py: Python script, ASCII text executable

I see what Kopano is wanting to do or is planning here, but wouldn't
such things better be done in a WIP or beta release instead in a new
main minor release? Debian isn't like files in /usr/[s]bin with a file
extension and thus it makes it hard to do a proper packaging here. I
tried to prepared some updated packages for this but I'm a bit unsure to
have done it correctly and didn't pushed this to Salsa.

And one more thing, I've seen Kopano upstream is providing Python3
packages like python3-kopano and python3-mapi which is quite nice. As
far I can see there is no configure option to enable the build of such
packages. What do we need to create the content for Python3 ready
packages? As I've understood configure.ac we need to export PYTHON so
something like /usr/bin/python3.
Wouldn't it be better to build all available python versions. And as it
looks like you just change the Shebang it shouldn't be that difficult to
do this twice for this.

-- 
Regards
Carsten