Support Your Distribution, or else …

packaging_boxesKolab is packaged for various distributions, and various versions of those distributions, in our OBS.

Most of the packaging work is performed by individual community members, and most of that occurs in their spare time. I mention this separately, because while I’ve been packaging Kolab for the past 6 years, including in my spare time, my employer does compensate me for the distraction.

While anyone is certainly allowed to package for any platform they choose to, the project that is Kolab will need to focus on those distributions that are also actually used. While I have some statistics on unique IP addresses hitting the OBS build system repositories month-by-month, this does not provide a complete picture.

For Winterfell, introduced not too long ago, I have made the decision to stick with CentOS/RHEL 7, and Fedora 23 in an effort to sneak peak at CentOS/RHEL 8, Debian Jessie, Ubuntu Trusty and Xenial, and openSUSE 13.2. To make the picture more complete I’m missing Debian Stretch and SLES. This builds a list of platforms and versions that Kolab 16 and subsequent releases could be made available for in the future.

The following long list demonstrates why and how no small group of people, let alone one person, can be expected to entertain every little tidbit detail of each of them:

Now, each of the code-names are links to the corresponding project in Phabricator. Here’s what might happen:

Either you and whomever else you can reach out to joins the projects of their preference, or I will find existing targets do not have an audience worth our efforts.

UPDATE: Another blog post on the subject has been published.

Published by kanarip