Meqaris - Read Me

This is the README file for Meqaris (Meeting Equipment and Room Invitation System), a system that allows booking resources by e-mail.

The main functionality of Meqaris is to accept e-mail invitations meant for meeting rooms and other resources. You can use the same type of mail invitations that you send to participants to book resources for meetings. Resources can be anything you wish - meeting rooms, mobile whiteboards, picture projectors, conference sets or anything else you need.

Meqaris allows you to:

• register meeting resources,
• send invitations to the resources (requires mail server support),
• receive positive and negative replies.

Requirements:

• a system with Perl installed, along with the modules listed in the Installation procedure
• a PostgreSQL database server, version 9.2 or newer, with the btree_gist extension binary file (you may need to install the contrib package or similar).

Author: Bogdan Drozdowski, bogdro AT users . sourceforge . net (English accepted, just say '[SOFT]' in the title).

License: AGPLv3+. See the COPYING file.

Compatibility

Various versions of Meqaris were successfully used with the following components in the following versions:

1. PostgreSQL:
   • 11.x (checked: 11.18), with an extra installation step
   • 12.x (checked: 12.13), with an extra installation step
   • 13.x (checked: 13.9)
   • 14.x (checked: 14.1)
   • 15.x (checked: 15.1, 15.3)
   • 16.x (checked: 16.0)
2. Perl:
   • v5.20.3
   • v5.34.0
3. Postfix:
   • 3.6.5
4. Cyrus IMAP (CalDAV module):
   • 3.6.0

Other versions may also work.

Troubleshooting

If you get errors similar to:

	Can't locate X in @INC (you may need to install the X module)

then make sure that all the required Perl modules and their dependencies are installed. If you installed them in non-standard locations, you may need to run Meqaris by using the perl command and pass the required paths in the -I parameter, e.g.

	perl -I /path/to/perl/modules /path/to/meqaris --conf /path/to/meqaris.ini

If the --status command displays something like:

	Configuration file '/path/to/meqaris.ini': OK
	Data directory: '/path/to/meqaris/data': OK
	Database connection: ERROR: cannot connect: connection to server at
	 "127.0.0.1", port 5432 failed: Connection refused
         Is the server running on that host and accepting TCP/IP connections?

then check:

• if the database connection parameters in the INI file are correct,
• if the database is actually running

If you send e-mail invitation to Meqaris, but don't get a response, then:

• check your mail server configuration if the invitations are properly passed to Meqaris
• check your mail server logs if the invitations were in fact sent to Meqaris
• save your e-mail to a text file, send it to Meqaris by hand:

  	meqaris --conf /path/to/meqaris.ini < your_mail.eml

  and examine the output.
• check the Meqaris' logs for more information. Increase the logging level if necessary.

Reporting problems

Any defects or issues can be reported by e-mail or in the SourceForge project defect manager (in English).

Any improvement suggestions can be reported by e-mail or in the SourceForge project ticket manager (in English).

To report usage problems, include:

1. the Meqaris version you're using, e.g. Meqaris 1.4,
2. the PostgreSQL version you're using, e.g. PostgreSQL 14.1,
3. the Perl version you're using, e.g. the output of perl --version:

   	This is perl 5, version 34, subversion 0 (v5.34.0) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi

4. a description of the problem that the software causes,
5. any error messages that are displayed or written to the log file (set the log level to TRACE, if possible),
6. precise steps for reproducing the error, if possible. This will make finding the problem easier,
7. the anonymized (all names and e-mail addresses changed to fakes) iCalendar attachment (if it may have caused the problem),
8. any other information that you think could lead to solving the problem.