On 21 September 2012 07:45, Florian Leparoux <[email protected]> wrote:
Le 20 sept. 2012 à 23:35, Jim Henderson <[email protected]> a écrit :
On Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:20:25 +0200, Florian Leparoux wrote:
We need to think for all non-english openSUSE community and not just for
the french community.
We do currently have a number of non-English language sections on the
openSUSE forums, including a French one - I don't know if you've talked
with the moderators of that group (though I know someone from Alionet is
talking to swerdna as well).
Jim
In fact there is a thread in alionet.org, in the ML-FR, a discussion with
opensuse moderator, #opensuse-fr and for finish in this ML
Flo
--
Hi everybody,
I guess it's time to explain a bit why we did this proposal, and why
we think it is a good idea...
The original objective is, as underlined by Florian, to make the
french community more coherent. I say french here for simplicity, but
that's a bit broader because this forum is used by french speaking
people, not only french. The french community is quite parceled out.
Participation to the broader, international project, does not suffer
from any problem. There are people participating to packaging, IRC and
other parts of the project from both forums. Fortunately. That would
be a real shame otherwise.
Currently, Alionet is offering some services. There's not only a
forum, but blogs, a CMS dedicated to news and an independant wiki.
There has even been an IRC chan... To be honest, that does not work.
We don't want to do that anymore, splitting our energy in redundant
projects. Whatever will be decided in the end, the wiki will certainly
disappear. It's already hard enough to maintain one, let's not
maintain both. And as I've said, we already decided to remove public
IRC chans linked to Alionet. There are still some private ones, but
dedicated to technical discussions around the website.
In my opinion, though, three things must not disappear. First, the CMS
(for the news), then the blogs. There are not much that are written in
french, and that's a good store front. People interested in openSUSE
can have news about it in french. That may seem silly, but... well...
french people are not always at their ease when it comes to speak
english. So they can't stay tuned with the projects and actions made
by openSUSE, or not in a single place.
That said, it's time to speak about the forums. Alionet is way more
used than the french forum in forums.opensuse.org. There are many more
posts there... Of course, that does not do everything. That's just
some "fact"... If we consider only people using forums (everybody does
not particpate to a project the same way... some prefer MLs, other
IRC, other forums, some use many of them...), it seems the Alionet
community is wider. I may be wrong.
On the technical side, we're actively working to enable nntp. That's a
problem because, for historical reasons[1], our DB uses an iso
charset, while the vBulletin nntp plugin requires UTF8. The SSO part
may be more difficult, however...
Finally, some side notes. Florian presented Alionet as a "concurrent"
of openSUSE. I don't think it is. Alionet is an association "loi 1901"
in France. The main reason, originally, was that we wanted to have a
clean way to collect money to pay our server. Until then, it has been
proven that, at a local level, it is a good way to gather people and
to strengthen the links between them.
The Alionet association has been legally created to "promote free
software, the GNU/Linux operating systems, and particularly SUSE and
openSUSE". I think it is self-explanatory. Moreover, since the
creation of the association, we've tried to participate to FOSS
events, on openSUSE stands. I went to the RMLL last year, in LUGs and
in Solutions Linux this year. I may be in Paris again in October. Each
time, we've made this with openSUSE mates. And I say mates. Even if
I'm the "president of the association Alionet", I'm also a member of
the openSUSE community, and that is always a real pleasure to meet
other members of this commmunity. And I personnally don't care if they
are "from Alionet or not". Alionet as been thought as a relay, as a
support, from the beginning. We won't fork the distribution, we won't
try to beat openSUSE. We want to work with and for openSUSE. Call us
concurrent if you want. I, personnally, wouldn't.
I hope this message helps the debate in some ways. I will follow this
thread, of course... as I do most of the time on openSUSE MLs.
Best wishes,
Alexis "Agemen".
[1] The former server were Alionet lived was not dedicated, and we
then did not have the choice of the charset for the db. That's a
shame... and fixing that takes some time.
--
OrbisGIS supporter.
