Hi Joerg,
Thanks for voicing your opinion.
On 7/26/24 15:25, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
Not going to stop you - I actually think it would be a nice thing to
have something like this packaged for real - but how realistic is this
in a Debian stable release (assuming you ever manage to get all of it
packaged and uploaded).
Using HA myself, that thing and all around it is changing faster than
anything else I ever saw. One basically finished updating ones install
and it goes again "Update available".
That's part of my motivation for having HA in Debian: I hate that it
wants to update too fast: faster than I can cope with, demanding too
much of my time. I do not really care having the latest shiny last
thing, I want something that works, that is reliable, and that I don't
have to maintain too much.
Also, what really is there in the updates? Maybe one doesn't care about
them 99% of the time. That driver foo for the device bar that you don't
even use, do we really need to update it? I hope the core of Home
Assistant itself doesn't move *THAT* fast. It's hard to tell without
inspecting all pieces of the puzzle.
Combined with upstreams focus on their HassOS thing (and yes, that *is*
damn easy and low-effort to use!)
I very much like Homeassistant. But there's many things I hate with
HassOS, like the fact it is focused on using containers, and trying all
it can to avoid exposing anything to users. I feel very uncomfortable
using it. I'm currently using their Virtualbox image. My current process
is to, every month, spend a few hours maintaining it doing this:
- shutdown
- snapshot
- start
- upgrade
- stop
- snapshot
- start
This is clearly what I would like to stop doing. I currently have to,
because a few times, the automated upgrades of Home Assistant broke
badly on me. I'm sure it's going to happen again: it also happened to
some of my friends.
is upstream support for "oh gosh you
outdated distro" even there, in case this ends up in a stable release?
That's probably what they will say. Nothing new, this is what all
upstream tell. Frankly, I do not know what's going to happen with HA in
a stable release or not. But even running Unstable would be a better
solution for me than their "OS".
I sure would like if it ever goes with an "apt install homeassistant"
and you have what "put this HASSOS image into a VM/raspy and automate
away" does now, thats a cool target. But you found yourself a hill even
larger than the OpenStack one - and one that changes even more often and
faster. :)
OpenStack needs roughly 200 packages upgrade every 6 months, in a
predictable way. I currently am not sure what it's going to be with HA.
I'm convince that *a lot* of device drivers for many stuff (heatings,
air-cond, etc.) will not change, because I'm seeing that what we're
packaging smells like old stuff already. It doesn't mean unmaintained,
it's probably doing what it should already, and doesn't need update.
Also, for OpenStack, I've been mostly alone. We're currently 5
enthusiastic DDs in the Home Assistant team. It's possible even more
will join us. I don't think I'm even going to be the main driver behind
this packaging, Edward seems very motivated, and he's done a lot already.
Anyways, that's the beginning of an adventure. Where this will lead us,
I'm not sure yet... For sure, looking at how, and even more importantly
what things get updated by upstream will be interesting, and this will
tell us if it's possible to have this in Debian Stable. Maybe the only
solution will be having most drivers in Debian Stable (the huge list of
680+ python modules we're packaging), and have HA only in a non-official
backport repo. IMO this would already be a great achievement.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
