An early Horde4 release for Kolab-Server-2.2.4

A while back p@rdus promised an early alpha of Horde4 for the Kolab Server for today. Which would have been followed by the release of the Horde4 mail client and the new mobile mail view in the following weeks. But as the Horde developer team has been quick to provide the new mobile view there is no need to delay the delivery of the mail client and the mobile portal any further. So you get a little bit more than promised today but as it is St Nicholas' Day that seems to be just fair.

Of course all the usual warnings apply. This is an extremely early packaging attempt. It is not well prepared and the installation procedure is flawed. There will be no upgrade path. Doing the following on your server has a high chance of damaging the system. Do not even think about installing the packages on a productive machine. In addition the packages just install the mail part of Horde and won't provide a lot of new functionality. And since there are tons of issues the stuff that is new is likely to be broken.

But those of you who have a spare machine with a throw-away Kolab Server 2.2.4 can try to install the packages using the following steps (this assumes your server is up and running):

wget http://files.pardus.de/horde4-20101206.sh
chmod u+x horde4-20101206.sh
./horde4-20101206.sh

You should be able to access the Horde4 installation at http://your-domain.com/client4.

Any kind of feedback is of course appreciated and will be used to improve the packages during the months to come. p@rdus will also continue testing and bug fixing of the packages while the final phases of the Horde4 development continue.

Now there are no December items of the roadmap left. So p@rdus will continue the next weeks with highlighting the new elements you can expect to find in Horde4. This should be accompanied with a few bug fix releases. In addition it is planned to provide you with a demo server in case you do not have a spare machine to test the new packages. So stay tuned!

PHP library release survey

Tobias Schlitt is asking PHP developers and users about their preferences concerning the release process of PHP libraries. I figured I spread the word and provide you with the link to the survey.

The survey itself originates from an ongoing discussion on how to release Zeta components. It will certainly not allow to extract a generic guideline on how to release your PHP code but I think that is also not what the survey intends to do.

The central question of the survey "What is your preferred way of installing PHP libraries?" does only have one correct answer after all. But that one varies depending on the person asked and on the installation target.

"Man, I clicked this cool button on my webhosters site and now I got this webmail installed in just one go. What a nice custom installer!"

"I just love Ubuntu. I even have that on my server. If I need a PEAR IMAP library I can just apt-get install pear-horde-IMAP_Client. If I need Horde I run apt-get install horde4. And I get all the security updates automatically! Using your distribution or OS is really the only choice there is."

"I downloaded Horde and installed it on my dedicated server. Set it to run on lighty and it's blazing fast. I connected it to our LDAP user DB. Now I still need to get the Facebook and Twitter API keys so our users can connect to their accounts there. Unpacking and installing the tarballs was no major deal."

"I'm a PHP developer and I want to code a small application that needs to handle IMAP. It needs to be better than the IMAP stuff from PHP. But I don't want to code the protocol handling myself and I don't want to pull something totally unstable from a repo. And please don't give me a full framework. I just need IMAP. Oh, and in a year I might want to upgrade in case there were fixes to the package. Can I get Horde_Imap_Client via PEAR please?"

"Huh? I code Horde, I do some PEAR. Sometimes I pull stuff via the OS. For customers the tarballs are great. But at the end of the day: There is only git."