Bug#625865: ocPortal Update
On Mon, 16 May 2011, Chris Warburton wrote:
Just thought I'd give an update on my progress. So far the ocPortal
codebase has been reviewed for copyright. Anything with unclear terms
has been removed/replaced, leaving behind Free Software and a couple of
proprietary third-party components (such as the JWPlayer flash video
player). The proprietary components have been turned into optional
modules, making them trivial to strip from the Debian package.
Sweet.
As well as this, the default ocPortal theme contains some non-DFSG-free
artwork for the icons. I've made a replacement theme based on KDE's
Oxygen icons which can be applied over the top of the default theme and
replaces all of the non-free artwork[1]. It's not a complete theme, so
there are still some default icons left which make the interface a
little inconsistent, but at least they're all freely licensed.
That's a reasonable place to be in for now. Make sure the tarball you
plan to upload to Debian contains only dfsg-free pieces.
Likewise sound effects for the audio CAPTCHA and chat rooms have been
replaced with DFSG-free files (sourced from existing Debian packages,
such as Asterisk).
Great!
I've been reading the policy guides (the core Debian policy, as well as
the PHP, WebApp and Database policies) and am currently working out how
to turn ocPortal's installer into a dbconfig-based debconf script.
*nod*
From messaging the WebApp mailing list[2] I've been told that one of
the biggest concerns would be bundling software which is already
included in Debian, which QA understandably frown upon. Unfortunately
this impacts ocPortal, mainly since it uses a heavily modified version
of CKEditor, a vanilla version of which is already packaged. Diffing
between the two gives an unfathomable mountain of changes, so
merging/patching them seems hopeless. I've tried symlinking to Debian's
ckeditor package in place of this bundled version, and this doesn't
cause any immediate problems in ocPortal, however our experience of
having CKEditor integrated is that there are a load of edge-cases where
it misbehaves; this is probably due to our particular usage of CKEditor,
which converts the HTML it outputs into ocPortal's Comcode language.
This makes me think that bundling the modified CKEditor would be
preferable, despite its existence in the Debian archive.
I would lean toward using the Debian-system CKEditor and maybe dealing
with a few bugs in these edge cases, in the short term.
In the long term, upstream, I wonder if you can switch to bundling an
unmodified CKEditor and writing custom code to transform its
*output* rather than modifying the editor itself. I wonder what
you think of that.
Thanks for this update! It's very helpful.
--
-- Asheesh.
http://asheesh.org/
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we
are not the person involved.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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