dedicated subforums for boards

[ag123]

moderators/admins, I'm thinking it could help to put Orange Pi Zero 3 in its own unmaintained boards sub section, it is likely there'd be more threads related to this
and to move this thread and the other thread into the new orange pi zero 3 board section

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by ag123

[Werner]

There is no need to add sub-forums. Threads are properly tagged, can be found easily: https://forum.armbian.com/tags/orangepizero3/

Also why wasting our resources when there aren't even official Armbian images for a board?

[willmore]

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  Is "Unmaintained" read as "no longer maintained/abandoned"?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?

[Werner]

52 minutes ago, willmore said:

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  Is "Unmaintained" read as "no longer maintained/abandoned"?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?

Each and every board (not board family) needs a dedicated maintainer attached to gain "maintained" status. If there is none or maintainer lacking their duties (loosing interest, missing deadlines...) boards loose "maintained" status and become unmaintained or community maintained. Both unmaintained and community maintained are more or less the same because boards can be unmaintained while still from time to time code gets pushed that improves it. So the line between these is blurred.

 

53 minutes ago, willmore said:

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.

It is not only not being maintained by Armbian. There is literally no piece of code in our build framework that relates to it. Therefore it does not exist. The tag in forums is goodwill only because it may or may not become introduced in the build framework at some point. Somebody seem to have done that already but (as we all know from certain people) GPL is violated by not sharing the source code. Maybe latter is available in the mean time, did not bother checking.

 

 

 

[Werner]

topic split since it is off-topic

[Igor]

12 hours ago, willmore said:

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?

 

All Linux distributions "supports" those boards once somebody ported this and that HW on particular Linux distro. This is the happy part, contributed by end user and thus cheap for everyone. Maintainace, keeping devices up and running long after this happy event, is something entirely different.

 

In just about every release we lost hundreds of hours to keep devices operational. If we can't secure people to keep level how we understand support, things are declared as (Linux) community supported. This is still a lot better then generic support as a lot of our support still find the way to community targets. As it was already mentioned, its a grey zone.

We can't really declare as "abandoned" or "eos" neither as we have competitors which doesn't have any troubles "supporting" HW while relying around 90-100% on our support system. In several occasions we had a clash with 3rd party users demanding (!) to fix some issues with officially unsupported targets. If its unsupported, we can deny support request without any additional lost of time. People takes this much better, in close to 100% of cases, this answers is accepted and for those few predators, rules anyway never works. Those has to be stopped by force.

 

Keep in mind that time we lost for supporting you is almost 100% our private expenses. We are a small project, so are donations. This is best effort support and somehow we have to try to protect from abuse that is coming from constantly hunger consumers. 

tl;dr;
You never get less support then any other Linux, just how to communicate this better?

[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.

[Igor]

20 hours ago, willmore said:

how to communicate

 

I lost more then 5 hours on an attempt to answer to this question. Its better to stop without answering, sorry. 

[Igor]

On 9/21/2023 at 2:15 PM, willmore said:

Is there a place in these forums for efforts to create support for currently unsupported boards to work?

How to make it clear. Armbian project is small. Too small. We don't have much resources, we are all fully over-stressed running on backup but you don't care to hear. You just want to have the same or better service, while contributing with ideas. We only have few dedicated and precious individuals, who do everything for other 1000 that contributes here and there and for those that are terrible stupid and are making damages to our project and open source at large. We are abused from Chinese capitalists on one side and their buyers (you) on the other side. It is fine if we can find a way to work together, but 0.5%, which is your financial input to this project, can and must be ignored each time you ask for something. I have expressed this too many times and you (as everyone) keep coming up with ideas what we should improve and provide.

Why don't you give one month of your personal payroll on the table before asking me to put mine for you. Why do you expect I will be gambling for you in a "business" where loss is secured. Just how big is unknown.

 

My biggest loss is communication which is why I usually tell people to fuck of so they stop asking question. Most of people that are reaching out to me or to project are seeking ways to profit, save time or just abuse. I simply can't afford to have discussion with all of them. I also have no interest and can't afford to invest my personal money into your idea, but can perhaps do it for compensation if there will be no better offer for our services. But there are enough alternative to consider.

 

I left security of my well paid corporate job, which was by far biggest sponsor of Armbian and subsequently Orangepi PCB maker, and now I waste all days just to keep this at this level. None of the subject from this topic is helping resolving much if any of common problems. They always cared on their problems with as minimum input as possible.

 

Armbian team also never had a single cent of budget to deal with Chinese capitalists buyers and their problems. Being polite to "customers" that can easily make us 1000 USD loss ob every 1 USD we receive from them is terrible bad. Telling you this costed several hours of calming down to be able to respond in a polite professional manner from sick and twisted relationship you are here eager to extend and upgrade ... Your requests without financial backing are just one of those ideas which are killing this place which we spent years to build.

We have some interest, but absolutely no resources to share with you or any budget to pay people to work more in 3rd party interest. Neither of you are paying "electricity" needed to run this project. I project interest is to carefully pick hardware we will invest into. I know it is hard for anyone to understand but I am pretty sure we lost more then 500.000 USD with Zero series so far. And you are both coming into this discussion without any cash. No offence, I understand you desire and I support your idea with one eye, just there is nothing I can do to help. We have to stay sane.

[Igor]

On 9/21/2023 at 2:15 PM, willmore said:

Maybe they are interested in their port becoming official and taking over an official Armbian maintainer role. 

In past 8 years we were more or less their software team if you haven't figured that out. We didn't have issues with that, they tried to cover that. We helped them and relationship was o.k. until greed took over. Just like in this attempt to abuse the project resource more efficient. We are helping you, while you never asked how we feel about and how we can pay the bills of damages you make to the project or if we perhaps need something. A way to eat food while doing this? We were driving their software support for many years, for a tiny fraction - i never wanted to go to close - of what they would need to pay for one person. Theirs I never met. We are significantly sponsoring their business and problem started when they tried to control us. At some point they said our work, which was "paid" with donation was just not good enough and we have do it better ... WTF? While their hardware, that is on the market, keep making us damages every single day (this is our fault, just saying). Remember, other party in this sick game, end user, doesn't pay neither. This CSC / Support / * status is just one of desperate attempts to draw a line. This line is commonly abused and it doesn't work for us, so we will change this strategy. Remember, this is to protect maintainers from abuse from users and contributors. You often don't know what we can do and where capacity of our integration ends. Below you can see one example as story.

 

Frustrated users doesn't read or care if its supported or not supported. They keep applying pressure to this forum, on private channels, anywhere possible. And when I use force to remove someone, I am worse person around. And I feel that way to. Its emotional burden of this job.

 

This was developed by @jernej and his part was probably also not paid by anyone. We did integration as this is what we often do. We received nothing from anyone to integrate this. We might get some donation from people that report this problem more then a year ago and were blocked by contributing their board to Armbian. How it went?

We started dealing with this problem about a year ago. To make story short, without reworking all this code it was impossible to support Orangepi 3LTS and boards with internal nic and audio as AC200 can be set this way or another ... I won't go into details as it can take hours. We started this project several times and each time I had to review & refresh the code provided by him, met with him in person, exchange several emails, talk with other people that were involved. Conduct professional development as we used to do. My attempt was often broken by some violence from users or vendor side. Certain type of abuse require my intervention and dealing with all sorts of sh* its breaking those cycles all the time. At one point I figured out many many other things need to be fixed before we can start dealing with this problem. Then i realized our Allwinner team started to fall apart and there is nothing we can do. I had to invest time to poke the dead horses back into action. We had several meetings, we were begging people to test as my device is broken, thanks to help of testing of @Tenkawa and help of many other people we resolved remaining dependencies and last week @Gunjan Gupta was finally able to make a tested PR on the topic. It feels sick how much time we lost to resolve this problem, but has to be resolved as certain boards were not been able to add. We lost hundreds of hours and we have hard limitations how much hours we can spent. This is something we will never allow you to have control over. Or worse. To capitalist that is flooding you with free PCB so you ...

[Igor]

On 9/21/2023 at 2:15 PM, willmore said:

I just hope there's a way to collect community base interest and effort and channel it into something that makes Armbian better. 

It is. Start listening. What do you think we do? The problem is our resources are not endless, we can't expand and we can't pay for damages that are generated even if we do everything for free.

It is similar to this example of technical problem. There are several dependencies that needs to be resolved, before idea can be taken into consideration. Until we don't have 100% financial security in advance, there is little we can move on. I can't finance any community ideas with beer level income that is coming our way https://github.com/sponsors/armbian https://liberapay.com/armbian What you are asking needs serious backing, professional management, team expansion, ... Just like most of request that are coming our way.