willmore

Igor, yes, I think the issue is the 'how to communicate this better' problem. I understand your situation and I appreciate all of your work. Let me add my perspective and the motivation that lead me to ask my question. In this thread we see that there is a desire to have a working Linux distro for the Opi Zero 3. Armbian is a great starting point--plain Debian would work as well, but Armbian has some SBC specific customizations that make it more appropriate--so that's what people tend to use. Someone pointed out there was a mostly working version available. They and others have been working for months to try to improve it. I think all of this is a simple distillation of facts and it's in dispute. Where there seems to be some issue is motivations. I don't know the person who made the original port--"leeboby" on github. I don't know what their long term intention is. Maybe they are interested in their port becoming official and taking over an official Armbian maintainer role. Maybe it's just a 'fire and forget' effort they did for some reason. I don't know. But the people here would clearly like to move towards some kind of more official board support under the Armbian umbrella. To that end, the question was asked if there could be a board specific sub-forum created for this clearly unsupported board so that conversations about an unsupported board wouldn't 1) pollute the general unsupported board forum 2) make it clear that it was unsupported (to manage peoples expectations) 3) make it easier for people to find information on the effort to get this board supported by Armbian. Having a sub-forum would help provide a sense of community and help develop interest in the effort. *with hope* a maintainer would be attracted to or developed by this community. As you point out, this is a completely volunteer effort. I see people in this thread (before the split) who are showing interest in doing volunteer work. I though I reasonably could expect a community manager to encourage the development of a community--in this case by creating a sub-forum for the board under the unmaintained board/sun-xi forum. So, the question I though was being asked is "can this effort find a space to work?" What you heard was "support this board!" Your reply was "we aren't going to support that board without a maintainer". What I heard was "we have no interest in assisting in your effort to support this board". So, let me ask a better question now that I hope we all have a better shared understanding of the context of the question. Is there a place in these forums for efforts to create support for currently unsupported boards to work? It would need to be such that it's very clear to anyone participating that *the board is not supported and might never be supported by Armbian and that it's simply a community effort to try to reach that goal*. I hope that addresses your concerns with people trying to abuse Armbian for support of other peoples ports. If the answer is no, that's fine, this is your forum and it's up to you to decide how you wish it to be used. I simply wanted the proper question to be asked so that we all knew what was being asked. I just hope there's a way to collect community base interest and effort and channel it into something that makes Armbian better. Thank you for all of your work and specifically the time you've taken to address this question of mine.

I'm trying to wrap my head around saying that there's no point in making a subforum for this board in the "Community Maintained/Unmaintained" forum for a board that is not maintained by the Armbian team. Am I misunderstanding the meaning of Unmaintained or Community Maintained? Is "Unmaintained" read as "no longer maintained/abandoned"? Implying that it was once maintained but no longer is?