On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Filippo Carletti < [email protected]> wrote:
> [English is not my native language, please bear it in mind if some of > my sentences may seem incorrect/inappropriate] > If my German and French were anywhere near your English, I would be delighted. > I also don't understand why this effort wasn't put into SME > > Server 8. Supporting both simply won't happen and the guaranteed > > fragmentation of the community is sad. > > Gordon, nice to hear from you. > I think that you (and many others reading here) are missing the > discussion that took place in September/October 2009 (more than three > years ago) in the "Board" mailing list. > There, we talked a lot about the future of SME and came to nothing. > Agreed. That exercise was a dismal failure. It should be completely ignored. The only way SME Server will survive is for developer and tester involvement. The whole "board" concept was to provide a financial base for the distribution. That failed, multiple times. > During the last years, I, Federico and Giacomo contributed to sme > providing bug fixing, patches, new features, testing and a bit of > support. Sometimes, we had our patches refused, especially for new > features. It forced us to fork some sme packages, we did that with > disappointment, we tried really hard not to fork, but we have a > business and our customers always have a point, so if the feature they > were asking for was useful we developed it, submitting a description > to contribs bugzilla, providing code and building packages if code was > approved. > We have been and still are very open to discussion. > Excellent. Having patches refused and modified is a normal part of development. As long as those discussions were openly tracked in Bugzilla, I think it's perfectly reasonable to come to the decision that you need to fork individual components for your use This, again, is normal. Ideally those forks would be available in the contribs repository to simplify a merge at some later stage if others felt your changes in direction were correct. However, I am concerned that a wholesale rewrite of so many components has been done and it will simply not be possible to reverse that without a huge effort. But the discussion that took place in the close Board mailing list led > us to think that a new effort to further develop sme was doomed to > failure. > That is quite sad, but I understand this view. I think you should completely ignore the failure of the board (and any attempts to do such again) and concentrate on the technical aspects. > We set some key points (close to upstream as much as possible, proven > technical base, well known and widely used components), we aimed at > some goals (simplicity, user and sysadmin friendliness, easy > troubleshooting) and tried to imagine where we wanted to go. > These sounds like good goals, and, I believe are totally in line with SME Server development over the years. We always avoided forks from upstream unless there was no option (templates helped immensely here) and made some choices based on best of breed at the time which may be different today (e.g qmail saved us from at least one remote sendmail exploits. I'd choose Postfix today, but I actually think that change is neutral from a server capability p.o.v.). > Now, we have reached a point were we have something working, and we > wanted to show our work. > It's an alpha release, it has bugs, it is subject to changes. But it's > modular, easy to customize and modify. > It's GPL, every issue is publicly discussed on redmine. > That's excellent. I wish you all the best. Gordon > I wish everybody a happy new year. > > -- > Ciao, > Filippo >
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