FreeBSD Port

kyguy80 · Post by **kyguy80** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 2:53 pm

I'm interested in porting Zimbra to FreeBSD. Which portions of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite require a C compiler? I'm assuming I should use a compiler that is recommended for FreeBSD.
I'm new to porting applications to FreeBSD, so this is definately going to be a learning experience.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

rmvg · Post by **rmvg** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:29 pm

I also use FreeBSD have been since version 4.2 and would love to see zimbra ported Freestyle haha. Anyways never done any porting before or much coding mostly a config tweeker. However always willing to learn let me know if i can help in any way.

marcmac · Post by **marcmac** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 5:34 pm

First step here is to download the code and poke around a bit - that's the best way to get an idea of what's needed for a port.
The only portions of the app that require a C compiler are the thirdparty components - postfix, cyrus, some perl libs, ldap, and clamav. Everything else is java, or Perl.

goo0h · Post by **goo0h** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 6:18 pm

[quote user="marcmac"]The only portions of the app that require a C compiler are the thirdparty components - postfix, cyrus, some perl libs, ldap, and clamav. Everything else is java, or Perl.[/QUOTE]
Cyrus? What of Cyrus do y'all use?

17629anand · Post by **17629anand** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 6:33 pm

cyrus-sasl - we have added zimbra/SOAP auth to saslauthd.

jdalberg · Post by **jdalberg** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 4:08 pm

I have had a little poke around.
It seems a bit uphill to port, since we dont want stuff in /opt on freebsd, and the /opt/zimbra part seems pretty infiltrated in the makefile.
We want the port to take care of all the 3rd party dependencies, all of which are allready ported to freebsd so that the port will only build core zimbra stuff.
We will have to patch the ZimbraBuild/Makefile, and quite possibly alot more.
Unfortunately, the first time I ever installed tomcat was today. But I will most likely start building a test port tomorrow. As far as I can make out, the build.xml's in ZimbraServer and ZimbraWebClient for ast will have to heavyly patched aswell, so that configuration files can be made more freebsd like.
Are there any zimbra plans to make these more generic in the future? Less centered around 3rd party components being installed with the actually zimbra installation...
Wouldn't i be enough to just depend on them allready being installed? Would that even be neccessary? Couldn't you add say, openldap, after the zimbra install. As far as I can see, there is no linking of any zimbra code to any 3rd party software. As someone stated, its all perl and java.
It might be that I dont understand enough yet, im certainly no java or ast expert!
On freebsd, we would depend on the jakarta-tomcat55 port, and thus zimbra would have to be configured to install its tomcat conf in the default freebsd webapps dir, which is somewhere under /usr/local and also it would have to _not_ install tomcat under its own install dir (/opt/zimbra which under freebsd would have to be /usr/local/zimbra or something like that), as one example of the kind of stuff that needs to be patched. Same for the other 3rd party stuff.
The scripts installed in /opt/zimbra/bin would have to be more freebsd like, they are currently written to handle the "everything under /opt/zimbra" scenario.
Any help and or hints from the zimbra guys would be greatly appreciated.

17629anand · Post by **17629anand** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 4:21 pm

porters out there who want to pursue the install zimbra on top of my existing pieces - please also read ZimbraServer/docs/INSTALL.txt and ZimbraServer/docs/INSTALL-mac.txt. You will get some pointers on how to install the Zimbra app on existing components. These docs won't answer all your questions, maybe not to 100% in sync, and not supported

, but will definitely be helpful.

geekgod · Post by **geekgod** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 6:47 pm

[quote user="kyguy80"]I'm interested in porting Zimbra to FreeBSD.[/QUOTE]
I would also like to work on a FreeBSD port for pfSense (http://www.pfsense.com). Would you care to team up and knock this out? I plan on diving into the code a little more in the next few days.

fak3r · Post by **fak3r** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 3:23 pm

I run FreeBSD on my main server - backup is Gentoo. My idea is to get it running on Gentoo, then see what needs to be done to bring it over to FreeBSD. Once that worked I'd look at making a port.
fak3r

nickhilliard · Post by **nickhilliard** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 11:39 am

[quote user="jdalberg"]I have had a little poke around.
It seems a bit uphill to port, since we dont want stuff in /opt on freebsd, and the /opt/zimbra part seems pretty infiltrated in the makefile.[/QUOTE]

Uh, yeah, /opt/zimbra is pretty pervasive throughout the code. It would be a major job to make it install in an arbitrary location just now - lots of autoconf stuff required. I think it would be better for the Zimbra people to sort this out in the way that they want to do it long-term rather than attempting any local FreeBSD patches and hacks, which would be completely unmaintainable.
Also, from a porting point of view, this is much less important than getting the system up and running on FreeBSD. Once it's confirmed working in a stable manner and that it can be built consistently using the ports building system, then these issues can be sorted out afterwards.
nick