Survey Software

[David Nalley]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

At the Events FAD we spent a good chunk of time looking at and working
on some of the Lime Survey dependencies. Unfortunately, they have
modified some (and they claim most) of the bundled libraries,
effectively forking them. We talked about a number of different
mitigation strategies. We can get a number of people involved and try
and get these modifications accepted upstream, however that is likely
at least a month and likely many months of slow moving work, with no
guarantee of success.

I've included the IRC conversation below that I had with one of the
limesurvey devs.

We talked about a number of solutions at events FAD, with suggestions
ranging from, pushing patches upstream, to using different software,
to forking.
The path of least resistance is using different software, and I found
one package called phpESP which looks ok, I haven't found any bundled
libs at all in a really brief perusal of source. The community seems
somewhat active (the latest version was released in Janary)

Soooo - please take a look and see if it meets MKTG's needs. I may try
and package this tonight regardless of MKTG's decision, but if someone
wants to beat me to it, I have a 4 hour trip back, so feel free to
pick it up.



09:35  c_schmitz: sorry for the lag - basically the issue is that you
guys bundle libraries (which every web app
does, and we break them out and bundle the package separately) but you
guys have modified at least one of
those libraries, so packaging the upstream library doesn't really
help, as we are missing those changes.
09:42  yes, ke4qqq
09:42  we modified almost all liberaries
09:42  due to bugs etc
09:43  we communicated these bugs to the devs of these these libraries mostly
09:43  but they are very slow to fix
09:44  so I don't recommend to break out any of teh packages
09:44  unfortunately our packaging guidelines don't permit us to not -
(and debian is the same way)
09:45  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries
09:45  well, then you have a problem
09:50  I would not know how to solve this
09:51  using your bundled libraries will introduce certain bugs
09:51  bundled libraries=separate packages
09:51  yes
09:52  which on the other hand will mean that we will have bogus bugs
reported to us
09:52  for which we can't really give support
09:52  well we are actually discussing this at a Fedora Activity day -
and hopefully we can add an extra voice to
get those patches accepted upstream
09:52  won't be a short process unfortunately
09:53  but in the long run hopefully better for everyone
09:53  sure, but this is a huge problem with every packaging
09:53  Ubuntu packaging is a little more relaxed about that
09:53  yes it is (/me packages a number of webapps for Fedora and deal
with it a lot)
09:54  I totally appreciate your effort
09:54  It will help the LImeSurvey project to have to as a Linux package
09:54  better: Fedora package
09:55  you should also get in touch with nijaba
09:55  (Nicolas Barcet)
09:55  since he is the Ubunut packager
09:55  Ubuntu
09:55  ok, I'll do so


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Use GnuPG with Firefox : http://getfiregpg.org (Version: 0.7.10)

iEYEARECAAYFAktl3wwACgkQkZOYj+cNI1cpdACfSO+tmU+lgnIzAkHEIhWNGqS4
Vw0AoK/QwYMUWXRPpRvlYd9QWUg4oJ3K
=anrn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----