Re Martin! >>> On Wednesday, 28. June 2006 at 10:52 pm, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, the OpenPKG registration process is still a big annoyance and hindering > adoption/usage of OpenPKG a lot. > We introduced the registry because we needed some statistics about the OpenPKG world. Past experience showed that unenforced feedback was close to zero. Talking not only about technical issues, I underestimated the complexity of the overall change and, probably most important, the aversion of our user base. We went the enforment route when we were close to a make-or-break decision regarding the future of OpenPKG. Granted, our mistake was the timing. The proceeding was too sudden and too complete, giving parts of the community a feeling of rudeness.
It is a matter of fact that people are very sensible to any change which makes their world harder, slower, more expensive or otherwise "worse" from the point of their sole egocentric perspective. Some boil that down to the philosophic message "change is bad". There are good reasons why even in a democracy tax payers are not asked whether they support a tax increase, culprits are not asked for their penalty etc. Finally, months after the introduction of the registry, OpenPKG still exists as an offering free of charge. You have to thank the registry and the people who use it. > E.g. the stupid registration feature requires email validation within a short > period of time (some minutes). This breaks much too often! Think about people > doing something else in the meantime and especially consider the very commin > smtp greylisting. > The period was set to an hour already and if I remember this change has been made upon your request. Also a bit off topic, I do not accept people attempting to make their problems mine. Greylisting is sensitive to all kinds of timing issues and the people who use it (should) have made their decision to use that technology based on that design issue. Back to the topic, the registry must not assume message transfers happening close to realtime. UUCP still exists in 2006. The timeout has been extended to some hours now. > An additional idiocy is that after the registration timed out the system > dissallows to start over :-(( > It seems a restart has been denied because the registration succeeded. We should consider improving the (error) messages. > This is now the third time that I tried to register and the system is still > not working reasonably. > We constantly receive registrations so the process is feasible. Unfortunately, we cannot ask the people who failed because we do not know them. Gotcha. > In case the fascist(*) registry process does not get relaxed very soon I will > stop recommending OpenPKG as a solution and will move away my systems and OSS > projects from using OpenPKG. > I hope you are fully satisfied now and we can count on your evangelism. > (*) I consider very tight timing requirements > Has been discussed above. > and removing of already working > features (like unrestricted download of > Imagine that: before the registry, every piece of OpenPKG was available free of change to anonymous users. At this point, any "change is bad" from the egocentric users point of view (dejavu, eh). Today OpenPKG is available free of charge to known users. The effort for users is to reveal their identity in form of a working E-Mail address. > old versions > Others simply discard old versions. We do, too. You probably should setup a mirror. You know we still support rsync also it is counterproductive for the registry idea. > and breaking exisiting > installations and setups as an unfriendly action. > I must point out that this statement is unacceptable wrong. The concept ensures existing installations and setups do not break - they continue to run as they did before! It might not be possible to repeat pre-registry steps to create a new setup, so documentation and/or scripts might be updated. Various kinds of self created automatisms might fail to download new updates unless modified to work with the new registry world order. The obmtool being used by the Kolab community has been modified very shortly after the registry was established. It is refreshing for me to learn what users demand from a free offering. -- Thomas ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
