Packaging a2billing

[Thomas Goirand]

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 03:36:10PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm not sure how to get in touch, if I'm using a wrong way, please tell
>> me. Should I use a mailing list? pkg-voip at lists.debian.org maybe?
> 
> Yes, please. Keeping you CC for now as you're not (yet?) subscribed.

To tell the truth: there are different level of friendliness in thee
Debian people, I was not sure, seems this group (at least you) is a nice
one! :) I am subscribing.

> Looked at a2billing two years ago. Ran away screaming.

That was quite my reaction too. I have sent some emails to the upstream,
telling about my feelings, but I didn't get any reply.

However the upstream tarball is very very ugly, maybe the code itself is
still valuable. I didn't had time to dive in it correctly, but at the
first look, it seems ok. The big issue remaining is that if the upstream
is not responsive and there's a security issue, what will we do? I don't
like much such situations.

> Some relevant guidelines. Feel free to follow them if they help you :-)
> 
>   http://webapps-common.alioth.debian.org/draft/html/
>   http://people.debian.org/~seanius/policy/dbapp-policy.html/

Thanks for the link, I knew about them, but it's good that you refresh
my memory, so I will check them both again when my packaging work is
finished, to make sure it's policy friendly.

One thing: I quite hate dbconfig-common, I tried to use it once more,
and I hate it even more. I might need some help on that one.
Specifically, is it good practice to:

. /etc/dbconfig-common/my-pkg-name.conf

in the /usr/share/dbconfig-common/scripts/my-pkg-name/install/mysql ???

I have found the documentation about it quite scarce, and I hate to have
to guess here. I quite don't like the "drop the sql upgrade script in
that folder and done", I think it's best to control what I'm doing with
a sh script, and ATM, I'm not sure if I'm doing the right way. Let me
know if you know please.

>> I was wondering if you guys are interested by my work. 
> 
> Yes. having it packaged would surely help.

Great!

>> Also, is there a hope for FreePBX to be dfsg free, and uploaded to main,
>> one day? Maybe we could use the older jpgraph 1.53 that is in main? I'd
>> be interested in working this out as well.
> 
> There's a slow (or rather: non-progressing) work in progress on FreePBX.
> DFSG is not the issue. There are some non-required non-DFSG stuff that
> were removed (jgraph, and some non DFSG modules).

What's the blockers? How may I help? We really need the packages for our
internal purpose (that is: resell VPSes with VoIP web interfaces), and I
am willing to spend the time on it.

Side note (not so important, really): I don't know SVN, I jumped from
CVS to Git, as I understood SVN is quite like CVS (which means: *bad*).
Are you guys thinking about moving to Git? I quite don't want to learn
SVN myself...

Thomas