Re: More on the future LDAP admin gui in Debian Edu
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:26:49AM +0200, Jürgen Leibner wrote:
> On Sunday 24 October 2010 23:20 Klaus Knopper wrote:
> > Hello Jürgen,
> >
> > On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 10:33:45PM +0200, Jürgen Leibner wrote:
> > > On Sunday 24 October 2010 21:55 Philipp Huebner wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > On 23/10/10 17:14, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > > > >>> who in skolelinux is activly working on integrating cipux?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Noone.
> > > > >
> > > > > Which makes me wonder why the people using it in
> > > > > Rheinland-Pfalz are not doing this. Or why you dont do it. Care
> > > > > to explain?
> > > >
> > > > IMHO this is a very good question which I would also love to see
> > > > answered.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Regards,
> > >
> > > +1
> > >
> > > ... and me would also like to hear a statement / answer from the
> > > project leader of the RLP project to the question above to get it
> > > answered from the officials.
> >
> > I'm not sure whether I qualify as "official", but from my point of
> > view as coordinator of developers for Skolelinux-RLP, all of our
> > previous attempts of working together with the Skolelinux community,
> > trying to integrate new features and options/requirements that are
> > necessary by (german) law for german schools, have been turned down
> > as being "not very interesting for mainstream Skolelinux" (exam mode)
> > or "violating the policy" (italc), which is kind of frustrating, as
> > you can imagine.
>
> For me, you quallify as an official.
> As I'm having an eye on CipUX since it was first shown to the project on
> the gathering in Erkelenz (Germany) in 2006 iirc and being part of the
> CipUX-Project at that time where the decision was done to choose LWAT
> and not CipUX, you can beleave me, that I can understand that kind of
> frustration.
LWAT was OK, when it was still working. On the previous-last Skolelinux
edition, LWAT even worked parallel to CipUX.
> But for me it is much more frustrating to see people with that huge
> amount of knowledge like you, Petter Reinholdsen and others, not
> pulling at the same end of the rope.
Actually, I think we do. We just have different priorities. My job in
RLP is making sure that things required for our schools are present at
the end of the project, which means, I have to work with fixed deadlines
as well as regulations determined by law and our project requirements
specification that was given to me. Petter does not have to follow any
of these restrictions, and I can understand if he thinks that they are
extra work not currently relevant to Skolelinux. Also, release schedule
of Skolelinux updates is much more relaxed than ours, because as usual
in free software, mainstream Skolelinux is ready when it's ready, while
our tools have to be production-ready as soon as schools are scheduled
for installation.
> > Besides administration of classes, this mainly concerns examination
> > modes and requirements for privacy and teacher supervision of
> > desktops, disk quotas and x2go as replacement for ltsp.
> >
> > Before I get too much into details which you probably don't intended
> > to hear, would you please define for me the part "not doing this" in
> > the quote you voted +1 for:
> >
> > "Which makes me wonder why the people using it in Rheinland-Pfalz
> > are not doing this."
>
> As Holger Levsen asks: "who in skolelinux is activly working on
> integrating cipux?" which is "doing this".
Sorry, I think you missed my point.
None of us can "integrate CipUX into Skolelinux". We need an official
Debian-Edu maintainer to do this. None of our developers is capable of
making an official decision on which packages go into Skolelinux and
which don't (at least I don't recall having one in our group yet). We
WISH that all of our stuff goes into Skolelinux as optional add-on some
day, as soon as it's complete (and most of it is), but we are not the
decision makers here.
What we DID is, installing CipUX on top of official Skolelinux, partly
from existing packages made by Jonas Smedegaard, and the rest by
following Kurt Gramlichs long installation instructions for those parts
that are not officially packaged yet. Also, we created a new GUI
(CATWeasel) designed to represent only the small subset of LDAP tasks
needed by teachers and students, while most sysadmin tools are used by
supporters in our schools and don't need to be accessible by teachers.
We forked italc (since we were told not to - under any circumstances -
change existing packages in Debian because some kind of assumed "policy
violation" that I don't fully comprehend) for interfacing with
examination mode and internet access control and a HTML widget to
integrate with CipUX, for easy use by teachers from their desktop. In
fact, there is a lot of work done in those yet "unofficial" packages
that are designed to easily be installed on top of Skolelinux as well as
Debian Lenny.
> So the question I agreed to is:
> "Why are the people using it in Rheinland-Pfalz, are not activly working
> on integrating CipUX in skolelinux?"
>
> > What is "this"?
>
> " integrating CipUX in skolelinux"
So, again, what is "integrating CipUX in Skolelinux" other than deciding
that existing installable packages are accepted and possibly modified in
their initial setup so that they fit in? How can we do this? Not only
for CipUX but also for italc and linbo (which are independent of CipUX)?
Unfortunately, the developer base working on CipUX itself is very small,
but, as Jonas already said, the core parts of CipUX are already in
Debian.
What needs to be changed in order to make these packages fit into an
official Debian blend, needs to be done by an official Debian-Edu
maintainer, or am I wrong here? It's not sufficient that our packages
run fine on our own Skolelinux installations.
> > What does it mean?
>
> Making CipUX being on the install medium and provide it ready to use and
> preconfigured at first boot after installation.
So, how can I make CipUX "appear" on the official Skolelinux install
medium?
And for the preconfiguration, maybe a hint for Jonas as Debian package
maintainer for CipUX, and Christian as main CipUX developer, would be
helpful every now and then. I agree that GOSA probably has more features
than CipUX right now, but then, CipUX is more of a Middleware or
Framework than an "admin tool", and its RPC server is good for
supporting different Clients as frontend, which maybe makes it more
flexible. Installing both, GOSA and CipUX at the same time, may be
complicated because of possibly different incompatible LDAP schema
addons. I did not check on this yet, though. Letting the user decide
which one to install, and adding a "Conflicts:" tag just in case, could
be an option. But we can hardly decide on our own that CipUX should be
on the official Skolelinux install medium, so, we just create our own
add-on-CD for now in order to be able to meed the deadlines for school
installations.
Greetings
-Klaus
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