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Re: Howto package squirrelmail plugins the Debian way (Was Re: Sieve client)




On 24-jan-2006, at 15:24, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:

Hello Josep,

To install any plugin you have to download the tarball and detar the package into your squirrelmail plugins directory. Eventually for each particular plugin some
configuration file might be edited.

I guess new updates of squirrelmail will break the plugins installed manually. My question now is how I could package the plugins the Debian way? Can we generalize
a method for evey plugin or perhaps setup a package with all plugins?

PD. I included the mantained of squirrelmail package in CC since he can bring some
enlightment.

Sure. We thought about this issue before, but did not yet arrive at a
satisfying conclusion. At one point, some of the more popular plugins
were packaged separately (each in a package), but this was rejected by
the FTP-Master due to "archive bloat". So this path is out.

Another option would be to group plugins into larger (source or binary?)
packages, for example a selection of addressbook plugins. These would
all be installed and the admin can select which to enable. This has some
disadvantages aswell: you install things you don't need, you need to
group sources from different upstream authors into one source package.

.. I feel this would be the best option. Security updates are important since all of this will be exposed to the net. Size doesn't matter, even if you'd install all known plugins it would use only a small amount of diskspace. Most of all, as Josep mentioned, this way the plugins would be upgradable too when moving to a new debian release. If the user would like to free up diskspace, deleting some plugins is a trivial task, but would apt be able to notice the deletions and act appropiately when upgrading?


A third option is some way to make local packages of squirrelmail
plugins, a la java-package. This provides the benefit of installing them the "right" way, but also just that: it doesn't yield (security) updates,
debian-tweaks or integration.

If you have ideas on this subject, or would like to help out on this,
we're glad to hear from you. I acknowledge that there's currently no
good solution, and input from others is more than welcome.


Thijs
(I'm not subscribed to debian-user)

Peter



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