Hello Packman maintainers and community,
As a Network and Security Engineering student, only 2 years younger than the Packman project, I am interested in continuing it. It would be a great learning opportunity for me and now I have found my Linux home on Tumbleweed (and Leap on my server), I am happy to help it out. Through iterating on my home server since early secondary school and my studies aligning exactly to deployments like this, I am about as experienced as you will find for my age. And I do have some moderation and community management experience under my belt, from some larger Discords I helped out in and maintaining my own online space. For me the Packman repository is still useful for the codecs, as this makes game streaming way less fiddly to set up without the extra layers of Flatpak or similar interfering with input redirection. On my own I would attempt to cobble together a minimal repository for this and making other streaming experimentation easier, with the Mesa driver for hardware acceleration. Same with integration of some apps like Kdenlive, which is more reliable when running on the base system and picks up custom themes I use, even if the Flatpak works fine. But I know how invaluable wireless drivers and similar can be if you are unlucky with soldered hardware, same with similar OBS blacklisted software. And in the future I might take a stab at packaging some kernel with AMD tuning options unlocked, for the sensible use of tuning older AMD cards to waste less power (though I think the OBS could do this too). So if this is feasible for me, I will give it a healthy level of effort to continue Packman in stead and have others package stuff. For the infrastructure, on my own I can muster a minimal setup which would allow Packman to hobble along while there is interest for it. I would re-purpose my current desktop, a Ryzen 5 3600 build with 32GB of RAM and put it on the wired guest network of the residential router and 250/250 connection. Which I was already planning to do for my own projects, but that would still leave massive overcapacity which this would put to use. Probably pairing it with a minimal VPS for proxying the web facing front-end, but not much more so I can afford to keep it going in my current situation. No promises on uptime, but I have a decent track record with my Better than Adventure server and website and while not redundant the local ISP is reliable. Unless one fits on that machine I probably will not be running a build worker, as I do not have the RAM to spare for it. I am available for coordination of the build workers and some of the other community and repository tasks, but would prefer to stick to the hosting and some infra. So I would probably act as a fallback coordinator, stepping in if no-one else is available but staying in the background otherwise. My own home server infrastructure already has multi-stage backups, which I would expand to include this project. Most of it uses Restic now, which has well working de-duplication, compression and granular retention controls, making it very compact for what it does. But I would keep a few snapshots of the VMs too, as a backup option in case this software fails. My system needs a cleanup, which I would do in the drive shuffle needed to fit more backups, due about now anyway. I would have to obtain new hard drives for this, which in the current market is very unfortunate. So when covering the costs on my own, the redundancy would be 2 drives in different servers, running different distributions and filesystems. The current SSDs can be used for a redundant 4TB of storage for the live server, though a 2TB setup would work out better as my own stuff needs some of this space. Pretty much, I can support a bare minimum setup on my own for as long as it does not outgrow my local hardware or ISP's fair use policy (which is generous enough). But I'm certainly happy to cooperate in a group for it, or to have others supply more suitable hosting. For me Packman is convenient but not critical, the alternatives without Mesa of Flatpak, the VLC repos or even hopping distribution would work out too for me. As mentioned though, if there is a path to keep Packman going I want to help out for it, for the learning experience and usefulness for Tumbleweed users. This is my first time messaging on a mailing list, so apologies if I did something wrong here. I am reachable through the openSUSE and my own Matrix and Discord or this [email protected] e-mail. And I have been around in the openSUSE Discord for a bit. Do note that my main Matrix account can not join the openSUSE support room specifically on that platform. Thank you for reading and thanks for the work on maintaining Packman all these years! Greetings, "RedWyvern" / wyvern.red Signed, "wyvern.red operator". Sent with Proton Mail secure email. _______________________________________________ Packman mailing list [email protected] https://lists.links2linux.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/packman
