On 04/09/11 18:01, Rob Weir wrote:
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Terry Ellison<[email protected]> wrote:
On 04/09/11 17:22, Simon Phipps wrote:
On Sep 4, 2011 5:14 PM, "Rob Weir"<[email protected]> wrote:
Another thing to note is that the existing forum volunteers do not
"own" the support forums. They do not operate autonomously.
Are you sure? I believe they do.
+1 to Simons view -1 to Rob.
AFAIK, A Sun admin has logged onto this services maybe half-a-dozen times to
install the base O/S and Coolstack years ago, and no "Oracle"
Oracle-employed admin has ever done so. Coolstack is years out of date for
this reason. I (assisted by Drew in the early days) do all of the root
admin as well as run the Forums.
They have always been autonomous from the OOo project organisation
hierarchy. The initial decision to allow their creation in the first place
was more of a Sun one than an OOo project one -- as the project didn't see
the need to have a working User Community and Sun did and provided the box
for us to run our service on, though in later years the project came to
value the role that the forums have played.
So from day 1 the forums have always been autonomous. And one key driver
here was so that the community could have the freedom to up-sticks and take
their knowledge elsewhere should the relationship break down -- our primary
allegiance and service duty is to the end-user community, and not to a
development project. The last friction was over the whole issue of whether
the forums should continue to support non-Oracle variants such as
LibreOffice, which it did and still does against some then strong Oracle
opinions.
I think that both Drew and I have said this on a number of occasions. To
demand that the community unilaterally surrender such autonomy without
reasonable engagement is a pretty sure way IMHO to force them to consider
the "new home" option. Despite all of the hassle over the last few days, my
preference would be to vote to stay, but I am only one voice in what I think
is currently a minority opinion.
First do you at least acknowledge that your earlier statements that the
forums do not operate autonomously was factually incorrect?
I think it would be good if they made up their mind soon. I thought
we were close to the physical migration being completed.
Second on technical point actual the workflow goes (my SSH to Oracle) ->
(my VM in my house) -> svn -> the ooo-*.a.o VMs. The infra team have
been very insistent that this last step can be done by any sysadmin. It
really doesn't have to be a susadmin in a.o. This is a pretty trivial
step that could be pretty much anywhere.
If the
current volunteers are not on board with the Apache project, then
we'll need to explore alternative approaches, such as:
1) Point users to http://www.oooforum.org/
2) Do support via mailing list only
3) Use forums, but find new volunteers
If these are your options, then perhaps we should put this to a formal
PPMC vote and inform the community of this -- if the outcome is as you
are proposin ing this ultimatum, then you really are forcing them into
the revolt option. Very unnecessary and regrettable, IMHO
