21 Sep
2012
21 Sep
'12
12:37
(pretending this was send to the list :D) Le 21 sept. 2012 à 09:49, "Alexis \"Agemen\""a écrit : > On 21 September 2012 07:45, Florian Leparoux wrote: >> Le 20 sept. 2012 à 23:35, Jim Henderson 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... Thanks for that, it clarifies things. > 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. Agreed. Note that when we like to get things on openSUSE infrastructure, that is NOT against alionet or anything - we just happen to think that less fragmentation is better, just like you want. People who search for openSUSE are most likely to end up on openSUSE.org - and thus on the french stuff there, and miss alionet. So, having everything on openSUSE.org is better. > 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. Nah, it is understandable. That's why planet.opensuse.org is multi-language. News.opensuse.org is not but we're actually currently looking for a solution for that - as you see, the announcement of openSUSE 12.2 was translated but we put links to the wiki page on news.o.o as a work-around... > 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. First, I wouldn't call Alionet a competitor, rather a family member. on the Alionet association: that is absolutely awesome, and that should be kept. Heck, it should be mentioned on the openSUSE side. I do prefer to keep things centralized where it makes sense but of course having Alionet for planning booths and handling money is really cool! >From your post I take it we agree that fragmentation is bad. Two things: - first of all, the French community has to make the final decision, not the global one. I think it's your work and your community. I think we all agree on that, I just want to say it out loud. - Second, IF you decide to stay on alionet.org - I'd rather remove the openSUSE french pages and forums and link them to alionet.org than keep the fragmentation. But. I really think it's better if we manage to move everything to openSUSE servers. That would mean you guys benefit from our sysadmin work (and maybe our sysadmins can get help from you, too). And it is easier for people to find. And if you have ideas for improvements, we can do that together and it benefits everyone using our stuff! And if something goes wrong (fights or a forgotten renewal of a domain) it is easier to fix/safer in openSUSE. Together stronger and all that. We don't want too loose anything (or as little as possible, so we could for example import the posts from alionet.org to forums.opensuse.org. If that is possible of course. And if there are other things you guys miss, we should be able to run that on our systems - too. Or fix our systems, with your help of course. And we can do this step-wise. So you guys run a bunch of things - we can start moving those one by one, have a multi-year plan for all I care. Take the time to do it right. But have consolidation as a long term goal! Just something you have to decide on. I think the others in the thread made clear: we'd like to have stuff on openSUSE.org, preferably running the same way and in the same software as the rest. But it is your call - you're doing awesome and we'd much prefer to keep you doing that than discourage you. So, think about it, talk to our sysadmins maybe, yell at us if our infrastructure can't do things you need (because that would be something we have to fix) etcetera, and pick what works best please! Hugs, Jos