King InuYasha wrote:

I had noticed how well that Zimbra has been doing, and I was wondering if it would be possible for someone to make packages for Zimbra to be included in Fedora?

Well just my personal opinion... Zimbra might be doing well but the deployment system leaves a lot to be desired. Best I can tell (installed on CentOS5) the current version available is packaged with a broken tomcat server. There are some other things that should or would need to be addressed also such as the way zimbra provides things like mysqld, postfix, ok everything that makes zimbra work.

Step one disable the firewall, step two disable SElinux, step three run the install script that will do a lot of things including install the rpms...

Robert 'Bob' Jensen

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 12:47:52PM -0500, Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote:

Well just my personal opinion... Zimbra might be doing well but the deployment system leaves a lot to be desired. Best I can tell (installed on CentOS5) the current version available is packaged with a broken tomcat server. There are some other things that should or would need to be addressed also such as the way zimbra provides things like mysqld, postfix, ok everything that makes zimbra work.

Step one disable the firewall, step two disable SElinux, step three run the install script that will do a lot of things including install the rpms...

I'm a bit surprised this thread had so few reactions. Zimbra is really a very useful piece of software and the "groupware" category of software is really missing from Fedora (and most other distros, AFAIK).

IIRC there are build instructions (don't remember if they provide a src.rpm or spec file, it's a while ago that I looked into it).

But: does it run without a non-free Java?

And: can for the bundled packages that you list above the standard Fedora versions be used instead?

And last but not least: does Zimbra have a true Open Source license?

Jos Vos wrote:

I'm a bit surprised this thread had so few reactions. Zimbra is really a very useful piece of software and the "groupware" category of software is really missing from Fedora (and most other distros, AFAIK).

Zimbra is not distro friendly. It ships it's own versions of everything and also requires selinux to be off and iptables to be off.

IIRC there are build instructions (don't remember if they provide a src.rpm or spec file, it's a while ago that I looked into it).

They don't provide srpms. Even their rpms need to be installed with their install script. The rpms themselves assume very strange things that would never be accepted into fedora in their current state.. and this is just from watching the massive errors when installing without their installer script (and with selinux enforcing.. now that was a mess.. had to rebuild the server). I started to audit a policy for Zimbra and it made me green in the face.

But: does it run without a non-free Java?

I'm not sure what java they build against, but tomcat is broken on Centos 5 after *any* yum updates and some other strange issues. Maybe bob can chime in with his findings, it pissed me off enough I stopped working on it.

And: can for the bundled packages that you list above the standard Fedora versions be used instead?

I really wish they would release an "addon" package set that could be integrated with existing distro maintained packages, but I highly doubt this will ever happen. This being after I've studied their install system and have had Zimbra in testing for a while.

Please don't get me wrong... +1 to Zimbra for putting together a cool system, but don't expect to have a multipurpose machine after letting zimbra have it's way with your bits. A derivative distro would be more useful then what they have now :-/

If they do have RPMs, wouldn't they have to release SRPMs too? And I don't think Red Hat is stupid enough to just say all willy nilly that the SELinux should be shut off for Zimbra. They probably did some work to make Zimbra play nice with SELinux.

On 11/3/07, Jos Vos jos@xos.nl wrote:

On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 04:58:11PM -0600, Jonathan Steffan wrote:

...

They don't provide srpms. Even their rpms need to be installed with their install script. The rpms themselves assume very strange things that would never be accepted into fedora in their current state.. and this is just from watching the massive errors when installing without their installer script (and with selinux enforcing.. now that was a mess.. had to rebuild the server). I started to audit a policy for Zimbra and it made me green in the face.

[...]

...

I really wish they would release an "addon" package set that could be integrated with existing distro maintained packages, but I highly doubt this will ever happen. This being after I've studied their install system and have had Zimbra in testing for a while.

Please don't get me wrong... +1 to Zimbra for putting together a cool system, but don't expect to have a multipurpose machine after letting zimbra have it's way with your bits. A derivative distro would be more useful then what they have now :-/

This all is even worse than what I already from what I read and tried (but I didn't go as far as you did).

I'm afraid is not in their interest if distros are capable of including Zimbra. They use Open Source mainly as a marketing tool, for the rest the Open Source world can't do a lot with it :-(.

B.t.w., Red Hat eXchange (commercial and expensive add-ons for RHEL) includes Zimbra. Wondering if installing those RPMs (I assume they provide RPMs) screw up your RHEL system too.

-- -- Jos Vos jos@xos.nl -- X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364 -- Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Fax: +31 20 6948204

-- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

Well, the source code for Zimbra 4.x is large, the specfiles i think are generated by the Makefile in \ZimbraBuild folder. The structure seems similar in Zimbra 5.0 RC1, so there is a piece of the mystery there...

On 11/3/07, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams ivazqueznet@gmail.com wrote:

On Sat, 2007-11-03 at 18:13 -0500, King InuYasha wrote:

...

If they do have RPMs, wouldn't they have to release SRPMs too?

Not necessarily. There's no provision that says that packaging metadata has to be under the same license as the software.

-- Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams ivazqueznet@gmail.com

PLEASE don't CC me; I'm already subscribed

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On Sunday 28 October 2007, King InuYasha wrote:

I had noticed how well that Zimbra has been doing, and I was wondering if it would be possible for someone to make packages for Zimbra to be included in Fedora?

I spoke with someone from Zimbra at FudCon, They really dont want to work with any community. There needs to be alot of work done to be able to sanely package zimbra. I think ultimately it will take forking the last version released under MPL and moving forward from there. their current license is not acceptable for inclusion in fedora.

I think a better option would be open exchange it will work with all the pieces that are in fedora. rather than replacing apache, postfix, mysql etc they provide installation instructions http://wiki.open-xchange.com/wiki/index.php?title=Open_Xchange_Installation

We would need to create scripts to make tarballs from their cvs and package up things but I see 2 pluses, a big one being that everything is GPL, and the second being that they seem to want to work with their community. not dictate to them.

Dennis