Am Mittwoch, 14. Dezember 2005 08:59 schrieb Ralf S. Engelschall: > On Thu, Dec 08, 2005, Bernhard Reiter wrote: > > [...] > > I believe that it has other reasons that the feedback form was not used > > as planned. E.g. I saw the form, but I dislike forms like it so much, > > that I did not use it, though I am quite happy to give you feedback. > > Well, you see, you are a classic user yourself, Bernhard: in theory you > are happy to give feedback but practically you have not done it as you > dislike feedback forms. That's the reason why we unfortunately had to > use some more mandatory approaches...
The reasoning breaks in the "you have not done", I gave examples below where I tried to give and gave feedback to the project. If you type in my name in an internet search engine, you will see that I gave feedback to many many Free Software projects. I honor many project by giving them good bug reports and other things. As to the number of systems and the feedback form, I think it is a suboptimal way of getting feedback. To be more contructive: * explain better why this feedbackform is, and how the data is used. Especially make believable that this is _not_ the classical feedback form to sell email addresses to make money. * advertise the feedback form and the results * reward people somehow (like showing that you have changed some actions because of feedback). > > You are asking for the number of users. > > Usually download figures, as flawed as they are, good give > > you a base to estimate this. > > Unfortunately, not really. We tried this multiple times but because of > mirrors and proxies the numbers are such extremely distorted that even > an estimation is too far away from the reality. I see why this is really hard in this situation. > > My recommendation would be to come worth with why this decision > > is so time critical. So far it scheds general doubts on the future of > > OpenPKG. > > The decisions are such time critical simply because Thomas and I (the > main driving horses behind OpenPKG) are still under heavy personal time > pressure as our full manpower sponsoring for OpenPKG (which was the > equivalent of a full-time job until now) is terminating and to protect > the future of OpenPKG we finally have to make decisions now. And those > decisions unfortunately depend on whether the community is large and > diverse enough or we would just waste lots of personal time and money. Ah! I think we probably have to continue the discussion internally to find out if new sponsorship can be found and what the financial alternatives are. > > Our experience in the Kolab Project is that we get many people that > > question our choice of OpenPKG and I expect introducing registration > > to make it more difficult for us to put forth arguments for it. > > No, I see no real reason why your Kolab users _HAVE_ to register as > OpenPKG users, although it would great for us. But you are using just > a subset of OpenPKG for Kolab and for your users OpenPKG is just a > sub-technology. Your users feel they are Kolab users and not OpenPKG > users, so they will obviously refuse to register with OpenPKG, of > course. That's ok. Yes, I think you have stated one of the main problems that as a sub-system, OpenPKG is not of enough importance to our users. We are advertising this, though and after a while some people start to like it. It is different so people emotionally are sceptical a lot in the beginning. Some people will never like it, and hope to get it integrate in GNU/Linux distributions. This integration is a good development, of course, but OpenPKG has shown its advantages for me already. > > > In some ways the system can be seen as being more restrictive > > as what some commercial distributors of operating systems do > > (free and non-free). > > Restrictive? Hmmm. [will be addressed in a different email] > > [...] > > Just to give you an idea what I tried to get feedback for > > a) Bugtracker link not working; Status: Still unfixed, no feedback > > aafter three ttempts or so. > > Accepted. It is a shame [discussion forked.] > > b) Berkeley DB stability decision for OpenPKG 2.4 migration of Kolab. > > Status: I have had communications with Thomas about this before, but > > this mail went unanswered and we took a decision without answer. > > (Maybe because I was not properly subscribed to an openpkg -list.) > > Sorry, I don't know the details here, so cannot say anything. [ I will pull out my emails and submit it again to users. I think Thomas L. got it personally, too, but was on vacation during this period. ] > > c) Long term maintenance ideas regarding GNU/Linux Enterprise > > distributions. Status: I probably will have to resend the email. > > Here I don't know your question, [ I will resend the email to make it clearer. ] > but in general we usually support those > distributions for which inside the OpenPKG Foundation we have both a > valid license, a hardware (physical or virtual) and at least someone > who maintains this setup. So, for instance RHEL3 we kicked out as our > license expired, nobody donated a renewal and the underlying machine was > already more reasonably used with RHEL4. Good to know: So if we get distributions to get you a license, you or somebody else finds a machine, and we find somebody to keep the installation going, OpenPKG would support it. I could at least ask RedHat and we could look for contacts within Novell and Mandriva. > > > I personally think that the free of charge one-time registration should > > > be no problem at all for any serious OpenPKG user. > > > > I doubt it. > > You now force the Kolab Project to decide if we run a mirror (which you > > describe as unfair) or force the registration decision on our users. > > For the Kolab Project this is not a nice situation. > > Most users would want us as feedback station first > > and not have a heartbeat with OpenPKG. > > [...] > > Wait, wait. Kolab uses a *sub-set* of just about 50 OpenPKG packages. > First, you don't need a full-size OpenPKG mirror for this. Making your > sub-set of OpenPKG packages available to everyone on your server in the > form of a your "Kolab distribution" is both fair, license compliant and > fully ok from my point of view. Second, as I said, your Kolab users > don't _have_ to register with OpenPKG. We would like that you tell them > that in order to support OpenPKG they _should_ register, but there is no > requirement. Okay, if we can work with mirroring without mandatory registration and you (and whole OpenPKG) considers this fair, it takes a burden off me! As for security updates: We need to route them more through Kolab then, as we were encouraging people to directly get the updates from OpenPKG once they are available. But this is fine. Bernhard ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List [email protected]
