[Pkg-giraffe-maintainers] Bug#959151: kopano-server is built without KCOIDC support

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hello Martin,

Am 04.05.20 um 16:34 schrieb Martin Wolf:
...
> Sadly I can't help you, because I never built a package on debian
> before, I just have limited experience with fedora, also neither do I
> have knowledge of "Go".
> I have not looked into it too closely because it develops and changes so
> fast ...

well, that's part of the problem with the Go language (at least for me). ;)
It's fine if people want to use it, I probably wont ever.

> I don't know if this is possible with debian policy, but why don't you
> open a Patreon account like Ondřej Surý for Apache / PHP. I bet we could
> get some real money together to pay more developers.

Of course this is possible. For me this wouldn't solve any current 
problem. After you have collected money you are somehow obligated to do 
something for that money. For doing something you need time, and here 
again is the old problem. I don't have time to do this additional work. 
And the idea behind Debian is a bit different for me. I'm fine to spend 
free time to provide packaging for example. But I can decide if I want 
to do this and when I want to do this.

> Also maybe you could reach out to Mr. Bartels from Kopano, because it
> should be in their interest as well to have a wider userbase,
> shouldn't it?
Felix is subscribed to this list too so he is reading all the emails on 
this list I guess.

For sure Kopano has some interest if their software is integrated into 
Debian and by this also into all downstreams, at least in the past 
Kopano has contributed a lot as we have prepared newer versions in 
unstable and testing.
On the other hand Kopano is a company that needs to earn money to pay 
their employees. This can only be done if costumers are willing to pay 
money for services and support provided by Kopano. This works best for 
Kopano if they can control most of system and this also directly. So if 
a costumers wants some extra feature and is willing to pay programmers 
at Kopano he will get the features simply by installing a newer version.

This model of software development currently doesn't fit well into the 
release rules for the Debian stable release, only security related 
updates are allowed. Kopano doesn't maintain a stable release version 
for kopano-server e.g right now, maybe in the future. I guess mostly 
because the effort for this is to high compared to satisfy expectations 
from real costumers.

But Debian has also a solution for this problem, there is the backports 
repository. Here are newer versions, and not only security updates 
allowed. But as always, someone has to do the work. :) So we are back at 
the start. Currently the team behind the Kopano packages is simply to 
small to cover all things.

Guido and myself doesn't have a productive Kopano server setup running. 
We'd highly appreciate if operators of Kopano instances could join and 
can bring in their knowledge for providing more current package versions 
but also more automatic testing an installations. kopanoserver is a 
complex ecosystem and without automatic tests there is a constant risk 
we annoy user with broken packages.

I'd really like to get the current version from testing into 
stable-proposed-updates. But this costs time, if users could check if 
such an update is working on an productive setup we could move on and 
try to convince the release team to allow an update to s-p-u. Once this 
version is out we could also start again to package recent kopanoserver 
versions for unstable/testing and possible backports. But we can only do 
one thing at time. If you can test if the current version from testing 
is working than this would be helpful!

We can prepare some dedicated packages for this.

-- 
Regards
Carsten