[Webmin-maintainers] Re: [Volunteer for Debian-Webmin] (was Re: Webmin-Module)

[Jamie Cameron]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 05:29, Martin Mewes wrote:
> Hi Malte, hi Jamie, hi all,
> 
> please include Malte and the Webmin-Maintainers-List in CC.
> 
> "Malte Schirmacher" <thana@thana.ath.cx> wrote :
> 
> > Also ich hab mir mal ein wenig den Installatiosvorgang für
> > drittanbieter-Webmin-Module angesehen. Wo genau liegt denn da das
> > Problem? es wird doch _nur_ ein neues Unterberzeichnis für das Modul
> > angelegt?! Irgendwie seiht das wenig problematisch aus :)
> 
> Jamie, Malte is a volunteer for maybe solving the problem with 
> Third-Party-Modules on Debian. I know that you had some talks with the 
> Debian-Webmin-Packager about this, but I am not really at best 
> knowledge about what the problem was.
> 
> As far as I remember the problem came with the Cron-Webmin-Updates 
> because these .tar.gz's neede to be converted to a .deb "on the fly" 
> and installed with dpkg.
> 
> It would really be helpful if you could bring some more light into this.

The real problem here is that the Debian packagfe maintainer doesn't
want to put third-party modules installed from RPMs into the same
directory as modules from Debian packages. This could lead to problems
un-installing, or to packaged files being overwritten.

However, there is a solution in Webmin versions 1.180 and above. You can
add a line to /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf like :

extraroot_0=/etc/webmin-modules

and then have all third-party modules installed into that directory
instead, using the normal method of extracting a tar file. You need to
add the line

install_root=/etc/webmin-modules

to tell Webmin's standard module install code to use this directory.

If you were to make these two changes in the Debian package of Webmin,
it would remove the need to worry about converting .tgz files to .deb
format at all.

 - Jamie