[dev] Virtual machine bounty

[Colin Andrews]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> I think we should save that for a finished and community endorsed product.
>
> What would be great is if you could post, instead of the full image,  
> the steps to build it, and any scripts, customizations, the base os  
> distro, etc. So that we can work on that part, combine it with the  
> other submissions, and have a flexible way to build different kinds 
> of  virtual machines (or one kind, first :).
>

I've also been working on this bounty, but I haven't gotten so far along.

The idea described by Chuck above is the approach that I was going to take. I
was planning on creating a shell script and possibly patch/data files that
would recreate the image from a default debian netinstall. My main reason for
doing it this way is so that when one of the horde packages is 
upgraded, the VM
doesn't instantly become obsolete. Any changes necessary to install the new
package can be made to the script files incrementally then the whole image can
be recreated from scratch. We could even keep the source files under a source
control system and track revision history + file bug reports against the
project.

The thing that's gotten me bogged down (besides little work & family) is just
that I'm not very familiar with Cyrus or IMAP servers in general. I've found
some good docs (it turns out the best ones are the ones installed with cyrus
:P) but it will still probably take me a while to get to a proof of 
concept. If
anyone wants to pick up that thread and run with it more power to you.