Hi, folks. So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.
I only personally really needed OC for calendar and contact sync anyway, so I've set up Radicale instead: it's written in Python and it doesn't have a ridiculous forest of bundled crap.
Given that there are dozens of other things I could be spending my time on that I'd find more rewarding, I'm just not willing to do any further major updates of the Fedora / EPEL ownCloud package, I'm sorry. I'm willing to keep the current major versions (8.x in everything but EPEL 6, 7.x in EPEL 6) updated until they go EOL, at which point if no-one else is interested, I will orphan the package.
If anyone would like to take on the work of doing the 8.1 upgrade and maintaining the package in future, please do let me know and I'll happily transfer it over. To do a decent job, though, you are going to *need* to know or be willing to learn quite a lot of intimate and incredibly annoying details about things like PHP class loading and how Composer works. If you don't, for instance, know what it means for unbundling purposes when a PHP library specifies 'classmap' as the autoload mechanism in its composer.json file, and you're not willing to spend your time learning, you probably don't want to own this package. :)
I'm very sorry to folks who are using it, but I really can't deal with the crap any more. If all you need is calendar/contact sync, there are easier ways. Check out Radicale or something like it.
Upstream does of course provide ownCloud packages in an OBS repo. They do not follow Fedora web app packaging policies or unbundling rules, and probably don't work very well with SELinux. Switching from the Fedora/EPEL packages to the OBS ones is likely to require moving various things around and config file editing and stuff. I'm not going to document that, sorry. If anyone else does, though, that'd be great.
On 2015-08-29, 21:27 GMT, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi, folks. So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.
Hi, Adam,
thank you very much for your effort! Whatever future holds, you have made it possible to run ownCloud on RHEL with more or less working setup. THANK YOU!
I'm very sorry to folks who are using it, but I really can't deal with the crap any more. If all you need is calendar/contact sync, there are easier ways. Check out Radicale or something like it.
Of course, if Radicale works for you, gnu be with you and go for it! That’s all what really matters. However, let me add a word of warning for others, because it doesn’t have to work for everybody:
* Radicale (https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale) is a tiny project with a five and half substantial (more than 10 commits) committers (the half is for "System User"), huge majority of them (534, next in the order 26) by one commiter. There is nothing wrong with a project like that, but it has some consequences.
* Radicale does not and will not support full Ca*DAV specs and it seems to be "works for me" level of support and there doesn't seem to be much effort to fix issues which the maintainer is not interested in. So for example, Thunderbird/SOGO DOES NOT work (creates a duplicate items in the addressbook and calendar) and the issue seems to be open since 2013 (https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/42).
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Best,
Matěj
On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 01:17:56AM +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
On 2015-08-29, 21:27 GMT, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi, folks. So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.
Hi, Adam,
thank you very much for your effort! Whatever future holds, you have made it possible to run ownCloud on RHEL with more or less working setup. THANK YOU!
I'm very sorry to folks who are using it, but I really can't deal with the crap any more. If all you need is calendar/contact sync, there are easier ways. Check out Radicale or something like it.
Of course, if Radicale works for you, gnu be with you and go for it! That’s all what really matters. However, let me add a word of warning for others, because it doesn’t have to work for everybody:
- Radicale (https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale) is a tiny project
with a five and half substantial (more than 10 commits) committers (the half is for "System User"), huge majority of them (534, next in the order 26) by one commiter. There is nothing wrong with a project like that, but it has some consequences.
- Radicale does not and will not support full Ca*DAV specs and
it seems to be "works for me" level of support and there doesn't seem to be much effort to fix issues which the maintainer is not interested in. So for example, Thunderbird/SOGO DOES NOT work (creates a duplicate items in the addressbook and calendar) and the issue seems to be open since 2013 (https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/42).
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
Pierre
On 2015-08-31, 07:05 GMT, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
OK, perhaps I was more afraid that many people will read Adam’s email as “ownCloud is crap, Radicale rulez, let’s jump on that wagon everybody!”. Radicale is a minefield, and if your path happens to avoid the disaster than you may feel it works well. However, one step from the safe path and you are doomed (e.g., using Thunderbird).
Best,
Matěj
On Mon, 2015-08-31 at 12:13 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
On 2015-08-31, 07:05 GMT, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
OK, perhaps I was more afraid that many people will read Adam’s email as “ownCloud is crap, Radicale rulez, let’s jump on that wagon everybody!”. Radicale is a minefield, and if your path happens to avoid the disaster than you may feel it works well. However, one step from the safe path and you are doomed (e.g., using Thunderbird).
That kinda reminds me - is there some sane ownClooud alternative or at least a project aiming to become one ?
While a have seen various projects dubbed "ownCloud alternative" they usually just aim for a small part of what ownCloud does - for example Seafile seems to target file sync, sharing and file based collaboration and the Radicale project mentioned above does just address book syncing.
So is there no sane "full ownCloud alternative" that integrates: * file sync * calendars * contacts * task lists * collaborative document editing * plugin/extension API (preferably with support for Python plugins ;-) ) into one UI/account/framework ?
Best,
Matěj
-- http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/, Jabber: mcepl@ceplovi.cz GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* reasons why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then. -- John F. Woods
On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Martin Kolman mkolman@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, 2015-08-31 at 12:13 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
On 2015-08-31, 07:05 GMT, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
OK, perhaps I was more afraid that many people will read Adam’s email as “ownCloud is crap, Radicale rulez, let’s jump on that wagon everybody!”. Radicale is a minefield, and if your path happens to avoid the disaster than you may feel it works well. However, one step from the safe path and you are doomed (e.g., using Thunderbird).
That kinda reminds me - is there some sane ownClooud alternative or at least a project aiming to become one ?
While a have seen various projects dubbed "ownCloud alternative" they usually just aim for a small part of what ownCloud does - for example Seafile seems to target file sync, sharing and file based collaboration and the Radicale project mentioned above does just address book syncing.
So is there no sane "full ownCloud alternative" that integrates:
- file sync
- calendars
- contacts
- task lists
- collaborative document editing
- plugin/extension API (preferably with support for Python plugins ;-)
) into one UI/account/framework ?
Best,
Matěj
-- http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/, Jabber: mcepl@ceplovi.cz GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* reasons why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then. -- John F. Woods
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
As far as I know, ownCloud stands alone in offering the functionality it does.
On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 03:54:59PM +0200, Martin Kolman wrote:
So is there no sane "full ownCloud alternative" that integrates:
- file sync
- calendars
- contacts
- task lists
- collaborative document editing
- plugin/extension API (preferably with support for Python plugins ;-)
) into one UI/account/framework ?
The closest thing that comes to mind is Horde, though not all the interesting bits (eg file manager/sync) are packaged for Fedora.
FWIW, from my perspective, OwnCloud seems to basically consist of file synchronization with PIM stuff bolted onto the side, whereas Horde is a PIM/groupware system first, with the other stuff bolted on.
- Solomon
On 31 August 2015 at 04:13, Matěj Cepl mcepl@cepl.eu wrote:
On 2015-08-31, 07:05 GMT, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
OK, perhaps I was more afraid that many people will read Adam’s email as “ownCloud is crap, Radicale rulez, let’s jump on that wagon everybody!”. Radicale is a minefield, and if your path happens to avoid the disaster than you may feel it works well. However, one step from the safe path and you are doomed (e.g., using Thunderbird).
They are all minefields. They are either hidden from view (e.g. packaging crap of doom) or in the fact they don't have a lot of support.
On Mon, 2015-08-31 at 12:13 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
On 2015-08-31, 07:05 GMT, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Again, if it works for Adam (or anybody else) it is awesome, but I would strongly discourage anybody who is not willing to invest substntial amount of a sweat equity from packaging the package for Fedora/EPEL.
Not entirely sure if you meant packaging radicale, but if that is the case, radicale is already packaged in Fedora and epel 6 and 7.
OK, perhaps I was more afraid that many people will read Adam’s email as “ownCloud is crap, Radicale rulez, let’s jump on that wagon everybody!”. Radicale is a minefield, and if your path happens to avoid the disaster than you may feel it works well. However, one step from the safe path and you are doomed (e.g., using Thunderbird).
I said Radicale 'or something like it'. I like Radicale because its design approach happens to tie in exactly with my requirements: it actively chooses not to be a full caldav/carddav implementation but instead one which is designed to be as simple as possible in order to work with a commonly used subset of clients. I love that, because all my clients are in the subset and I'm very happy with a server that's as simple as goddamn possible.
But if it doesn't work for you, there are many options which are still not as big as 'an entire personal cloud system with seven different JavaScript minifiers and a code lexer in it'. There's using SabreDAV directly, and Radicale even directs you to several other alternatives in its 'technical choices' page, http://radicale.org/technical_choices/ .
There isn't really a great alternative to ownCloud (that I know of) if you actually *want* a 'personal cloud server' with all the bits OC has, but I realized I just don't and I can't stand the pain of maintaining that beast just to keep my calendar and contacts synchronized. I do honestly feel bad about it, but I'd rather be up- front than pretend I'm still doing it but actually never get around to it.
Il 31/08/2015 18:19, Adam Williamson ha scritto:
There isn't really a great alternative to ownCloud (that I know of) if you actually *want* a 'personal cloud server' with all the bits OC has, but I realized I just don't and I can't stand the pain of maintaining that beast just to keep my calendar and contacts synchronized. I do honestly feel bad about it, but I'd rather be up- front than pretend I'm still doing it but actually never get around to it.
What about OpenAtrium?
On Tue, 2015-09-01 at 11:00 +0200, Germano Massullo wrote:
Il 31/08/2015 18:19, Adam Williamson ha scritto:
There isn't really a great alternative to ownCloud (that I know of) if you actually *want* a 'personal cloud server' with all the bits OC has, but I realized I just don't and I can't stand the pain of maintaining that beast just to keep my calendar and contacts synchronized. I do honestly feel bad about it, but I'd rather be up- front than pretend I'm still doing it but actually never get around to it.
What about OpenAtrium?
I read the first part of the description and fell asleep:
"Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations and collaboration."
then I read the second part and went 'huh-wha?':
"Open Atrium 2.x for Drupal 7 A new architecture for Drupal 7 that is built upon Organic Groups and Panopoly and intended as an extensible collaboration framework."
So...wait...it's some sort of file sharing system built on top of a CMS? This doesn't sound like it's going to be any simpler than ownCloud. :P And it's still PHP. But sure, it's a thing!
On Sep 2, 2015 8:46 PM, "Adam Williamson" adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, 2015-09-01 at 11:00 +0200, Germano Massullo wrote:
Il 31/08/2015 18:19, Adam Williamson ha scritto:
There isn't really a great alternative to ownCloud (that I know of) if you actually *want* a 'personal cloud server' with all the bits OC has, but I realized I just don't and I can't stand the pain of maintaining that beast just to keep my calendar and contacts synchronized. I do honestly feel bad about it, but I'd rather be up- front than pretend I'm still doing it but actually never get around to it.
What about OpenAtrium?
I read the first part of the description and fell asleep:
"Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations and collaboration."
then I read the second part and went 'huh-wha?':
"Open Atrium 2.x for Drupal 7 A new architecture for Drupal 7 that is built upon Organic Groups and Panopoly and intended as an extensible collaboration framework."
So...wait...it's some sort of file sharing system built on top of a CMS? This doesn't sound like it's going to be any simpler than ownCloud. :P And it's still PHP. But sure, it's a thing!
Adam have you gotten in touch with Upstream at all? Seen if maybe they can make changes on their end to make packaging any easier? I'm sure some parts of it are just a result of php being php, but you did mention bundling for part of it. Maybe they'd be willing to work with downstream packagers to get things in a better place?
On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 20:49 -0400, Eric Griffith wrote:
Adam have you gotten in touch with Upstream at all? Seen if maybe they can make changes on their end to make packaging any easier? I'm sure some parts of it are just a result of php being php, but you did mention bundling for part of it. Maybe they'd be willing to work with downstream packagers to get things in a better place?
Extensively. They're reasonably willing to take changes that don't make their primary deployment story (use the bundled-to-hell OBS packages or use a bundled-to-hell container) any more complicated, but that's about it. They're not willing to proactively work on it themselves, and they won't take any changes that make the other approach even marginally more complicated. They also don't really seem to care much about trying to limit external dependency use or at least only use dependencies with relatively sane versioning policies either; they follow the typical PHP approach of 'throw libraries at the problem till it goes away (and evolves into a much nastier problem)'.
Viz that time they decided they wanted JavaScript minification, so they threw this bunch of complete craziness into the source tree: https://github.com/mrclay/minify (it's a giant bundle of minifiers and web service minifier interfaces, including one notoriously not- actually-F/OSS one, with no kind of sane maintenance practices whatsoever). I'm still trying to finally get a PR which gets rid of that thing and uses JSqueeze instead merged.
"PHP" really is about 80% of the problem here. PHP as an ecosystem is so heavily tied to bundling (particularly through Composer / Packagist, which is explicitly designed around bundling), and has such thoroughly entrenched traditions of terrible library development practices, that it's very rare to find a significant PHP project that even tries to be developed the 'right' way (wordpress and roundcube are the best examples I can think of).
That's a shame. I run an owncloud instance for the family right now, I guess I'll be swapping it out for an upstream package. Is there anything you're aware of that I should watch for during the migration? On Sep 2, 2015 22:37, "Adam Williamson" adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 20:49 -0400, Eric Griffith wrote:
Adam have you gotten in touch with Upstream at all? Seen if maybe they can make changes on their end to make packaging any easier? I'm sure some parts of it are just a result of php being php, but you did mention bundling for part of it. Maybe they'd be willing to work with downstream packagers to get things in a better place?
Extensively. They're reasonably willing to take changes that don't make their primary deployment story (use the bundled-to-hell OBS packages or use a bundled-to-hell container) any more complicated, but that's about it. They're not willing to proactively work on it themselves, and they won't take any changes that make the other approach even marginally more complicated. They also don't really seem to care much about trying to limit external dependency use or at least only use dependencies with relatively sane versioning policies either; they follow the typical PHP approach of 'throw libraries at the problem till it goes away (and evolves into a much nastier problem)'.
Viz that time they decided they wanted JavaScript minification, so they threw this bunch of complete craziness into the source tree: https://github.com/mrclay/minify (it's a giant bundle of minifiers and web service minifier interfaces, including one notoriously not- actually-F/OSS one, with no kind of sane maintenance practices whatsoever). I'm still trying to finally get a PR which gets rid of that thing and uses JSqueeze instead merged.
"PHP" really is about 80% of the problem here. PHP as an ecosystem is so heavily tied to bundling (particularly through Composer / Packagist, which is explicitly designed around bundling), and has such thoroughly entrenched traditions of terrible library development practices, that it's very rare to find a significant PHP project that even tries to be developed the 'right' way (wordpress and roundcube are the best examples I can think of). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
On September 3, 2015 9:50:35 AM PDT, Eric Griffith egriffith92@gmail.com wrote:
That's a shame. I run an owncloud instance for the family right now, I guess I'll be swapping it out for an upstream package. Is there anything you're aware of that I should watch for during the migration? On Sep 2, 2015 22:37, "Adam Williamson" adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 20:49 -0400, Eric Griffith wrote:
Adam have you gotten in touch with Upstream at all? Seen if maybe they can make changes on their end to make packaging any easier? I'm sure some parts of it are just a result of php being php, but you did mention bundling for part of it. Maybe they'd be willing to work with downstream packagers to get things in a better place?
Extensively. They're reasonably willing to take changes that don't make their primary deployment story (use the bundled-to-hell OBS packages or use a bundled-to-hell container) any more complicated,
but
that's about it. They're not willing to proactively work on it themselves, and they won't take any changes that make the other approach even marginally more complicated. They also don't really
seem
to care much about trying to limit external dependency use or at
least
only use dependencies with relatively sane versioning policies
either;
they follow the typical PHP approach of 'throw libraries at the problem till it goes away (and evolves into a much nastier problem)'.
Viz that time they decided they wanted JavaScript minification, so they threw this bunch of complete craziness into the source tree: https://github.com/mrclay/minify (it's a giant bundle of minifiers
and
web service minifier interfaces, including one notoriously not- actually-F/OSS one, with no kind of sane maintenance practices whatsoever). I'm still trying to finally get a PR which gets rid of that thing and uses JSqueeze instead merged.
"PHP" really is about 80% of the problem here. PHP as an ecosystem is so heavily tied to bundling (particularly through Composer / Packagist, which is explicitly designed around bundling), and has
such
thoroughly entrenched traditions of terrible library development practices, that it's very rare to find a significant PHP project that even tries to be developed the 'right' way (wordpress and roundcube are the best examples I can think of). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin .
net
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
You don't need to rush to do anything, several people have contacted me with interest in the package, and 7.x and 8.x are still in maintenance for some time yet. I just sent out updates to the latest minor releases a couple of days ago.
Le 29/08/2015 23:27, Adam Williamson a écrit :
Hi, folks. So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.
Thanks Adam for your work on this package.
Probably worth a "team" effort.
I propose to discuss how to maintain this important package in the PHP SIG mailing list.
Remi.
P.S. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/php-devel
On 2 September 2015 at 08:11, Remi Collet Fedora@famillecollet.com wrote:
Le 29/08/2015 23:27, Adam Williamson a écrit :
Hi, folks. So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.
Thanks Adam for your work on this package.
Probably worth a "team" effort.
I propose to discuss how to maintain this important package in the PHP SIG mailing list.
Remi.
P.S. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/php-devel
I have an active interest in this staying in Fedora at least so I'm willing to spend some time helping out.
-
Adam Williamson -
Eric Griffith -
Germano Massullo -
James Hogarth -
Martin Kolman -
Matěj Cepl -
Neal Gompa -
Pierre-Yves Chibon -
Remi Collet -
Solomon Peachy -
Stephen John Smoogen