17 Dec
2014
17 Dec
'14
2:09 p.m.
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Donations have dropped off sharply over the past two years (probably due
to the lack of new releases); believe it or not I pull in less than 15% of
my total *operating* costs (this does not include the cost of the
equipment itself). This is a large donation on my part to the project, in
addition to the heavy development I have done on TDE over the past 6
years, and I cannot continue to bleed cash on the required scale just to
have a faster upload of packages I don't even use. From what I gather
this is the sad state of affairs in many open source projects these days;
this is all probably related to global economic issues but I cannot be
sure.
I am hoping R14 will revitalize the project financially and I can then
revisit these decisions, but for now I am constrained by factors outside
of my control. TDE will continue to exist (a GIT server is quite cheap),
but the future form of this project will be determined by our users in the
coming months.
They were, but the RPM builds were not ready. I made an administrative
decision to release R14 at this time as the source was ready and the
Debian/Ubuntu builds were ready. I considered that it would do more
damage to both halt development for that length of time and spread out the
"release" (thus causing loss of visibility) than it would to simply delay
the RPM build availability.
While TDE has grown significantly from its early days we are still very
small compared to large corporate-sponsored projects like KDE, Gnome,
systemd, etc. This means our development process will, by nature, be
slower and bumpier than that of the larger projects.
Tim
On re-reading this message my tone may have not reflected what I was
actually thinking.
The RPM (and Slackware, and <insert distro here> packages are a very
important part of TDE. I want to thank Francois for providing the RPM
builds; much of my ire above is directed at the technical design of the
various packaging systems which require a centralized repository to
function. For small projects this is not much of an issue; for something
the size of TDE we are suddenly looking at a 200GB archive and very high
bandwidth costs even with a fairly sophisticated mirroring system in
place.
TDE will continue to support various distributions for as long as their
respective builders/maintainers are willing to provide packages; the
initial transfer speeds to the mirror system will be degraded depending on
the project's financial status but this is a relative nit imposed by the
unfortunate constraints of the real world.
Tim
Give it a couple weeks to mirror. Right now we are
having some issues
with our primary mirror (see the threads by Mike Bird on this list),
and
the financial state of the project cannot support a high bandwidth to
upload them faster.
Weeks?!? Sorry
about the delay; I wish I could improve the speed but external
factors impose constraints as always. :-)
I would have thought minimal QA was to ensure all mirrors were ready
before pushing the official announcement. Carts and horses and all that. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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