On Tue, Nov 29, 2005, David M. Fetter wrote:
> I may have missed something at some point, but if it's information of
> how many servers we have openpkg installed on, why can't we just fill
> out an online form? I would be more than happy to do that.
Yes, David, I know that you and some others would be happy to do that
and you used the OpenPKG Community Feedback in the past for this.
Unfortunately after even 5 years we just received about 30 feedbacks in
total although we asked multiple times to give feedback and tell if one
is an OpenPKG user. Before and after every release we explicitly involve
our users and ask for their feedback. The results you know: mostly no
feedback.
As I said and without kidding, even after five years we have not the
smallest clue how many users we have at all. It could be that we have
lots of users who care but just don't say anything at all because
OpenPKG "just works" for them (which would be cool, of course).
But fully serious: it could be also that we have just 100 users and
our current efforts for establishing additional OpenPKG services are
just a major waste of time and money. Well, it would be even ok if our
community is very small -- as long as we know it _before_ we burn the
additional time and cash (please understand that at this point in time
I cannot give more details here in public about the current ongoing
service establishment projects, but at least OpenPKG Foundation members
know what I'm speaking about).
> For that
> matter, the registry bit could be quite a bit less intrusive by just
> having it send the information you desire. My main point is, why not
> try to see how many of us setup the registry first, then if folks don't
> respond to that, pull the plug on rsync and other anonymous access? It
> would be better than pulling the plug and having mirrors that a bunch of
> us have get wiped out overnight. I, for one, can easily send you output
> from my automatic update process which would tell you the packages we
> have installed as well as the all of the options used on the number of
> servers that exist. I guess I didn't realize that all of this was going
> to be breaking in an overnight swoop and now it's caused a bunch of
> recovery work in our processes.
Yes, I'm very sorry that we broke at least the RSYNC part. This was
certainly our fault because we entirely focused on FTP. There we even
made sure that the "openpkg build" tool still runs seamlessly despite
the required login. It was not our intention to easily break existing
things. We really tried to minimize the impact.
As you know, the registration was even pre-announced inside the
OpenPKG Foundation about 2 weeks ago for testing purposes and just two
Foundation members responded at all (one of them were you AFAIK ;-).
Nobody else really cared very much.
So we had to finally activate it for the public to really get the
feedback about it. Without the current complains we still wouldn't even
know the existing problems. I dislike myself the "Heave ho!" approach
we had to choose. But experience with the Community Feedback form and
the various questions on the mailing lists to give feedback definitely
showed that the majority of the users of Open Source software is NOT
willing to give feedback as long as there is no real requirement for it.
Just asking friendly we already tried multiple times and without real
results. By restricting the anonymous FTP server access we have chosen
a registration trigger which we thought is harmless but still effective
enough.
Everyone, please do not hesitate to complain, too. We are really
thankful for really every type of feedback, independent whether positive
or negative. Finally pulling your important feedback is why we had to
apply the restrictions.
But please also try to understand our situation. The future of OpenPKG
strongly depends on whether the OpenPKG project finally knows its
community or not. And the registration is important for this. Well,
and if the majority of our community really finally registers with us,
perhaps we could even lift some of the restrictions in the near future
again.
I personally think that the free of charge one-time registration should
be no problem at all for any serious OpenPKG user. Also keep in mind
that we intentionally do not restrict the current OpenPKG-2.5-RELEASE
because everyone should be able to evaluate and easily start with
OpenPKG and just has to register if he wants security updates, older
RELEASEs or bleeding-edge OpenPKG-CURRENT.
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
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