Due to some gentle urging from Jonas, I thought I'd post here.
I've been contributing to Koha since 2012, but I think the original desire to get Koha packaged for Debian originates a couple years before then (and before the March 2013 mentioned in this thread). In the years that have followed, I heard some reasons why Koha hasn't been packaged for Debian, and I'll try to summarize some of the reasons I recall: I think one may have been a lack of licenses in files, although I think that's mostly been addressed. I think another was that Koha is a web app that doesn't create a single instance out of the box. Rather, it provides a command line interface for creating multiple instances. Historically, it has relied on Apache as a web server, although it has been moving towards using Plack, which means it could be more standalone and users could decide on their own choice of reverse proxies like Apache httpd, Nginx, etc. I wonder though if the Koha package for Debian could include a post install step to create a default site like Apache and then let users create other sites as desired. Another is that Koha has a tonne of Perl dependencies and while we try to use the versions that are available in Debian already, we do have to maintain our own separate repository for some dependencies which haven't been updated in Debian stable. One example of this is librdf-trine-perl. Debian stable uses 1.15, but Koha needs at least 1.17, because there were bugs in previous packages which stopped it being usable for the use case that Koha required. While Jonas has pushed version 1.18 to Debian unstable and now it's in Debian testing, I don't know if we'll be able to get it into Debian stable. And that's just one example. I'm confident that there are a fair number of others. Personally, I don't tend to use Koha on Debian. For years, I've built Koha from source, and recently I've been packaging a customized version of Koha as RPMs for openSUSE. However, I prefer Debian as my operating system of choice for personal use, and I'm curious about learning how to package for Debian, and I generally want to help others around the world, so I figured I'd contribute some thoughts and words if nothing else. -David
