[CentOS-devel] Forum overhaul

[R P Herrold]

On Tue, 25 May 2010, Monte Milanuk wrote:

> As an end user, I would like to know if there is any forward progress on
> doing something about the CentOS forums?

whatever forward means --

You don't like it for various reasons; a post in the first 
Forum thread listed from a centos devel was made, and no trial 
implementation indicating satisfaction with the criteria was 
made that I can see

I would add [with the benefit of time and knowing what is 
happening in the broader Open Source world] to z00dax' 
comment, that it should support federated authentication 
[ldap,OpenID, whatever]; show a low attack surface history at 
the CVE; be in active maintenance or better, development; be 
in a language permitting addon extensibility without having to 
'marry' the darn thing; and permit 'static' top pages to 
address 'slashdotting'.  Does it integrate well with puppet, 
mailman, and stock CentOS tools; is it Free and Open Source 
software using CentOS stock supporting packages?

> This apparently has came up time and again, with various examples being
> given of the deficiencies of the existing setup (depending on your point
> of view).

I saw chatter and grumbling between people who like 'pull 
content' such as forums

> As near as I can tell the general consensus seems to be 
> 'yes, something needs to be done'

And the mice voted to bell the cat.  If all noses are of equal 
value and no cost is placed on voting and no cost is imputed 
to the effort needed to make changes, then sure those choosing 
to speak as to a proposed change (without doing anything to 
further it) I suppose there is 'general consensus' in favor of 
said change.  But all I see from the talkers, is talk; nothing 
prevents any of the talkers from doing in a sandbox somewhere, 
so far as I know.

> ... and thats about as far as it gets.  I
> realize everybody has lots on their plate, but this has been languishing
> for a year or more, with no apparent changes being made.  For a
> self-proclaimed 'enterprise' OS, the associated support forum doesn't
> make much of a first impression.

And meeting the artistic sensibilities of some people is in 
the core goal set of CentOS, such that the project leaders 
_want_ to care just, because ...?

The loaded words and finger pointing 'quilting' phrases simply 
drip from your 'demotivating' post

If flashy and latest hotness Web 2.0 and such are what one 
runs, rather than binaries that work, with stability and 
predictably, I guess CentOS fails as a project.  So Sad

I see:

> X-User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 
> 10.6; en-US;  rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Lightning/1.0b1 
> Thunderbird/3.0.4

and frankly this is a GUI users complaint, I guess, 
considering the source

> What needs done?  What needs decided?  Whose backside needs a fire lit
> under it?  What can *I* do?

Look in a mirror perhaps and place your fire there first; 
Perhaps a running and ovbiously better replacement would 
convince the core team that it cares to undertake the pain of 
a conversion, and ongoing maintenance

TANSTAAFL

My $ 0.02

-- Russ herrold