Re: [H-source-users] future development on savannah

[bill-auger]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 03:16:28 +0200 Ian wrote:
> A couple more requests - please add me as an administrator, as well
> as give me access to the administration interface, on the mailing
> list at https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/h-source-users (and
> perhaps also
> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/h-source-usuarios) so that
> at least there's a backup for these as well.

there is also the h-client-devel list

https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/h-client-devel

this is perhaps to many lists considering their under-use - the
'h-source-usuarios' list has exactly one message on it from 2012 - id
say, one dev list and one users list is more than enough at this point
- even one list would probably suffice


On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 03:16:28 +0200 Ian wrote:
> 
> Great to see the interest from others too. I have very little time to 
> work on h-source, but I've been happy to keep h-node ticking along, 
> mostly trivial changes, such as adding new operating systems to the 
> list, and, as an administrator on the website, fighting spam.
> 
> The main issue is that h-node and h-source are quite far out of sync. 
> When I first started contributing, h-node had changes that weren't on 
> h-source, and h-source had had major changes to the framework that 
> weren't on h-node. I spent some time trying to bring the two back
> into sync, but wasn't comfortable uploading major changes to h-node
> which were not simply updates to what was on h-node, and that I
> hadn't written and didn't understand.
> 
> I've been considering simply uploading the h-node version to h-source
> It will roll back a lot of the
> framework changes from h-source

it would surely be best to have the code that is actually running in
production published as the canonical source; and there is no real
compromise associated with that - as i understood antonio, he has all
of his easygiant code on sourceforge, and those "framework changes" you
mention are entirely related to that, yes? - so its not clear that
anything would be lost if the current h-source savannah repo were
destroyed - even so, those could be kept as a separate branch in the
same repo for reference


On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 03:16:28 +0200 Ian wrote:
>  From the user side, I am always surprised that the site gets so
> little usage. Even FSF-certified hardware does not always get added,
> so that's an area for someone to tackle - spreading the word and
> improving the number of entries in the database.

i cant speak for the wider community; but i see h-node gets recommended
in the #parabola IRC channel almost daily - my main interest to begin
with is to make the desktop client more user-friendly - if more people
were using that, the ratio of valid entries could surely be improved
that way, as it prepares and uploads the reports automatically, and
without users need to run any commands or clumsily copy/paste the
outputs, yes?

i think the biggest reason that many choose not to contribute is
because it requires authentication - reducing spam is no doubt the
reason for that; but an ideal solution would allow anonymous
contributions of that could somehow be made to be less attractive to
spammers - for example, the drastic option, closing the website to user
input, and requiring the h-client as the only way to input entries into
the system - even without any authentication at all, that alone would
probably reduce spam; and the lack of authentication could actually
increase valid contributions