281–290 of 363 posts
Well, Home Assistant's handling of this is well-timed. I was just looking at the possibility of redoing my openHAB config in HA but this makes it really clear I don't want to go within a 150 mile radius of HA.
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It seems to me he states pretty clearly that his issue is the support burden, not some paternalism over users: > If users experiencing issues with the ambee library in this package, they will knock on my door. And I'm not willing to support that or accept that burden. Especially as I don't see a good repacking reason in this case. I absolutely agree that there is a legitimate reason to say "look, I can't handle the s…
The solution is to fork the project and give it a new name & URL so users don't knock on his door - he refused that option too! Kudos to the maintainers for their curtesy - they didn't have to ask him for additional permissions over and above the current licensing agreement - they have the rights to redistribute or fork the project, Frenck is against them exercising either right.
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What you are proposing doesn’t work with nix packaging
And that is the point: a nix problem becomes his problem all of a sudden.
And "becomes his problem" isn't right either. If he wasn't upset by normal packaging then there wouldn't be a problem at all.
It looks like the bigger question here is this: Is it the official policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be packaged by NixOS? frenck is the fourth most active contributor to home-assistant - and it uses quite a few libraries he has authored: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/graphs/contributors If frenck is saying NixOS can't package his libraries, he's actually enforcing that NixO…
> Is it the official policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be packaged by NixOS? I have the impression that it is the policy of the home-assistant project that their software should not be run in any way not supported by them, and not redistributed by any distribution or other third party. They're somewhat actively hostile against people not following that.
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It still takes effort to sort support requests into those he wants to handle and those he doesn't. If he thinks that the manner in which is work is being used is going to bury him with requests, whether he takes them or not, it makes sense to try to avoid the situation altogether. I don't think there's a way to actually do that with an open source project though.
I think he’s so focused on time management (from his about page), that he is catastrophizing about the future. He also clearly wants the fame from having a library in Home Automation, but doesn’t want to provide any support.
This library was written specifically to be used in Home Assistant, as per project policy the code that interfaces with devices needs to live in a separate python package. So there is no real fame to be had from this particular package.
He surely sees this repackaging as a source of potential headaches. If the nix folks could convince him that the package would never contain modified code (no no untested/unsupportable modifications), and further that the home-assistant package in nix would always use exactly the version specified upstream (so no version mismatch concerns), he would likely be less opposed.
Unfortunately the latter is very much not true right now.
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Wow, that thread is wild. If the views in that discussion are generally representative of the perspective of a majority of homeassistant maintainers & stewards, I'd be extremely wary of relying on the software long term. > Just do as he asks This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. What an awful community response.
> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree! The long-held…
HA are perfectly entitled to continue including the package. The NixOS dev opening that thread was doing so with the intent of warning them about a potentially problematic upstream maintainer. There's an argument to be made that that dev was overstepping, but they weren't making any demands: their intent was informational.
The community response was multiple HA admins expressing the opinion that NixOS should remove the package. That's definitively overstepping on their part, and completely against what open source is about.
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Yet the author is an admin on the HomeAssistant community forum, one of only 6. Presumably his other contributions to the project justify those privileges, and he did not shut down the passive-aggressive thread some nixOs folks started there, it was another admin (the founder of HomeAssistant). This sucks for nixOs, but it looks like community incompatibility means they won’t be able to support HomeAssistant at all.
Some context: Frenck is a core developer on the Home Assistant project, and was hired by Nabu Casa (the company the project's founder founded to try to create a sustainable funding source via adding some optional value-add services) to develop for Home Assistant full time. If instead of packing these separately, the home assistant nixpkg for home assistant simply downloaded all the required dependencies from PyPi, an…
From what I can tell the Home assistant core team doesn't not want to deal with any other installation variants than their own supported ones. Their user base consists of a lot of technical tinkering people (hobbyists, electricians, etc) but those who don't necessarily have Linux sysadmin skill's. So you could say they are skilled enough to get themselves in any of a hundred different configuration scenario's that would then need to be debugged by the HA developers for each support ticket. For a developer knowing the installation environment is at least sane is a great help.
That said, Home assistant does lend a lot of its growth to open source contributions, collaboration and being free software. If it was not as open in the beginning it might not have gathered enough attention to grow its current size. Cutting off developments in other directions like this to me feels against what FOSS stands for.
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I don’t think its as simple as respect the authors wishes. You are participating in a large OS ecosystem as soon as you become a dependency of another project. Most people don’t care about the package in this case and just want the package that is using it. The author is additionally being intentionally dense and inflammatory. They are unlikely to get their way acting like this instead of trying to find a compromise…
> You are participating in a large OS ecosystem as soon as you become a dependency of another project. It also seems the author wrote this library specifically to be included in Home assistant (since HA only allows glue code to be included in the core and keep the implementation specific parts in dependencies) and does a lot of HA development. So he knew what he was getting into. It's not like he's library was added…
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> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source. I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree! The long-held…
I think you've mistaken my assertion. HA are perfectly entitled to continue including the package. The NixOS dev opening that thread was doing so with the intent of warning them about a potentially problematic upstream maintainer. There's an argument to be made that that dev was overstepping, but they weren't making any demands: their intent was informational. The community response was multiple HA admins expressing…
The "potentially problematic upstream maintainer" being a Home assistant core developer.