[Pkg-openldap-devel] Re: the .org proposal or "join forces"

[Matthijs Mohlmann]

Hi,

Torsten Landschoff wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 10:41:01PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>  
> 
>>The "experts" here probably is the maintainers of the ldap package
>>itself, as this is more of a social challenge than a technical one.
> 
> 
> I don't see a social or technical problem with your suggestions. 
> The problem here is that I don't really have time to maintain OpenLDAP 
> anymore and Matthijs Mohlmann wanted to take over the package. 
> 
> I'll send your email to pkg-openldap-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org. 
> Perhaps he has something to say about this.
> 
I would really like to see this package team maintained. It is a pretty
complex package, with upgrade path from woody, and there still exist
bugs in the upgrade path (I haven't completely tested it yet)

Social problems: I don't see any ;)

Technical problems: maybe skolelinux needs some specific patches for
OpenLDAP, that will be a challenge to integrate.

What kind of patches do you have applied to OpenLDAP ?

> 
> 
>>Torsten: The issue discussed here is that Debian-edu maintains a
>>separate bug tracking system for its fork of openldap, and wether it
>>would be possible to work more closely with Debian. It is my
>>understanding[1] that the concrete reason to fork openldap for the
>>Woody-based Skolelinux is no longer relevant, but if new hacks would be
>>needed for a sarge-based debian-edu today, how would you then feel
>>about making room for a specially-featured variant of your package
>>released for experiemental? If you didn't want the extra burden
>>yourself then a possible approach would be making the package
>>team-maintained and let others deal with the different bugreports and
>>prepare the experimental package for you to upload.
> 
> 
> As long as whoever does the changes takes the responsibility to fix
> arising problems I don't see why this shouldn't work.
> 
Probably one or two people of the skolelinux project can join this
OpenLDAP maintainence team so we can integrate the work that is done and
discuss about the future maintainence of OpenLDAP.

> 
>>I am aware that the use of experimental is a hack (what to do if
>>debian-edu and debian-tiny wants different forks of same package?), but
>>I see that as a positive challenge within Debian, rather than the
>>current situation of Debian-edu IMO drifting off from Debian (bugs
>>filed at one BTS may apply to the other as well).
> 
Agreed.

>  
> I think it would be good to consider Debian based distributions as
> branches and merge in the improvements they developed at some point. 
> Sadly it is quite hard to merge Debian packages because there is no 
> common revision control system. I often would like to just run a 
> simple merge command to pull the changes of some other guy. This is
> often not possible :(
> 
> Greetings
> 
> 	Torsten
> 
The problem that we have at the moment is the license issue of OpenSSL
with OpenLDAP. That's also why the libraries of OpenLDAP 2.1.30 are in
the archive. They have a GnuTLS patch which solves the license issue.

I have already created packages for 2.3.11 including the libraries of
2.3.11 (not the one from 2.1.30) (Not yet committed to the svn repository)

The upgrade path from 2.1.30, 2.2.23 higher are tested, I'm not yet sure
if we are going to support a woody -> etch upgrade path.

Torsten: I understand the scripts providing the upgrade path, it took me
a while to understand it but that's done :)

Regards,

Matthijs Mohlmann

PS: Torsten, can you give me administrator rights on alioth ?
PS: For people willing to join please give me the login names.