From kde-www Tue Dec 09 16:09:55 2003 From: Andreas Pour Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 16:09:55 +0000 To: kde-www Subject: Re: apps/ftp.kde.com X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-www&m=107099152930002 Hi, There have been a number of comments on this thread and I will try to respond to them point-by-point, to the extent my feedback is warranted. First, what happened to appsy? My ISP first moved (resulting in some downtime) and then due to some space restrictions ended up disconnecting the MieTerra servers from the Internet; this brought down email, DNS servers and everything else so I was not reachable for a while (currently there is a bad workaround in place). Due to some travel and funding issues I have not yet found an alternative though some options are being worked on with the help of some potential sponsors. The sponsors might provide sufficient resources to maintain the site for the foreseeable future. Second, it seems that all the alternatives to using FM have been exhausted, due to the obvious reason that I have mentioned for a long time: maintaining appsy is a *LOT* of work. But this misses the main point: FM.net has been around longer than appsy, and one could always browse the site by "KDE" apps (if the site's project maintainer chose to classify the project in the KDE category, which of course is a requirement that would survive creating kde.fm.net or whatever). In other words I don't know exactly what is anticipated will change with FM. What made appsy special was all the work I put into it (not just in quality control but also in terms of finding applications to list). The other thing special about it was the binary packages. Of course currently the packages are subscription-only but that was meant only to pay for the bandwith the site uses. If the site obtains sponsors there is no reason why this package service should not be freely available; and indeed if that were combined with some sort of KDE client for easy install this would provide a nice advantage to KDE over some alternatives. The question again is one of sponsorship and the cost really would not be that great. Also I do not like the ever-increasing dependence on VA Software. To the extent FM does its own thing, great, but to the extent KDE encourages contribution to FM, I don't understand the point. I would note that KDE never encouraged contribution to a.k.c and to the extent someone seriously considers apps.kde.org I would note that also was never made available to a.k.c, so I wonder what has changed in these regards. I was personally content that a.k.o was not used as a.k.c was not controlled by kde.org and thus using a kde.org address was inappropriate - I remain of this opinion, whether a.k.c comes online again soon (hopefully) or fm.net is used. Third, there is the issue of turning over the a.k.c database/code to a.k.o or so. Due to some debt issues that currently is not possible (due to fraud on creditors principle), but if some way is found to pay off this debt this becomes a real possibility. There is no real point on focusing on this though at this point since the debt issue is a real problem ATM; however, I have been in talks with possible sponsors to solve this problem (perhaps with a few sponsors it will work) and the database and PHP code can be provided under a suitable OS license. Yet as was also noted this still leaves a site maintenance requirement which does not go away, even though this could be distributed somehow (e.g. in the a.k.c code any number of people can be given special "admin" status to approve a submission). There was also some talk about by S. Binner about "root" access to maintain a.k.c. I did inform him of this but I also told him this could be fixed (with about 4-8 hours work) so that the entire process - including binary package building - could work through the web interface; just currently with the lack of a firm commitment of help by anybody I did not think this was the best use of my time. So for me I go back to the issue of finding sponsors for a.k.c (I am happy to actually shut down w.k.c since with the new w.k.o it is not needed anymore; the search stuff I guess would need to be implemented elsewhere or that remnant could remain, it's not such a big deal). _______________________________________________ kde-www mailing list kde-www@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-www