hi all
With regret, I have decided to stop contributing to OMV - effective immediately.
I have worked on OMV since inception in 2012/2013 and before that being a contributer to Mandriva (probably starting in earnest in 2006/7 or so in some small way), and before that a user of Mandrake since 7.0 days. I loved the Prague meeting and the sense of purpose in creating the distro, but since then it has been a bit of a down hill slide I’m afraid.
People have more or less stopped contributing to the extent that fedya, bero and TPG do 99% of the development on cooker now. I chip in with bug fixes and updates where I can but lately I feel like i’m fighting a losing battle, due to the sheer volume of things that need doing in addition to bug fixes. We switched to a rolling system which requires good QA measures, but we simply dont have the man power to achieve either the QA or the updates/rebuilds needed for this kind of model, so thing invariably slip through the net. This has further contributed to the opinion that OMV is not for users, just developers. Over time, things havent gotten any better on the contributor front and the distro has lapsed. People dont want to upgrade from 2014 to 3.0 due to a perceived lack of quality, but 2014 is fast approaching obsolesence.
For instance, people talk about updating python 3.4->3.6 on 3.0 but this would require a huge effort which simply cannot happen or be adequately tested with the current setup. In cooker deps are left broken because someone updates to the latest but the deps are not rebuilt, there simply is not enough man power. This makes it hard to get stuff built on cooker without rebuilding a,b,c deps before the actual package you wanted to build in the first place. So stuff gets built on 3.0 first which is not the original intention. There are not enough people to fix bugs which dont relate directly to them (perhaps this is an odd thing to want to do, especially with your free time!).
Dont get me wrong, TPG, fedya and bero do great dev work, as well as colin, rugyada, ben, luca, mandian, jcl, anyone else who I forgot (sorry!!!) and all the folk who set out to help by raising bug reports. But for me it has just stopped being enjoyable and more like a chore, which is not good for anyone.
I had huge fun doing 2013/2014 and felt we were doing something good, but since then it hasnt been so much fun for me. However I do think what has been achieved with the man power available is impressive.
The fact that I’m posting this here instead of the cooker ML (because it is broken, it hasnt worked reliably for a couple of years for me now), is indicative of the decline I feel. I wish all contributors the best for the future, but I fear the worst sadly.
anyway, to all who I’ve worked with on OMV (who are all excellent), please keep in touch.
best,
crisb
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