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Messages - mal-keshar

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Off topics / Some reflexions on Zentyal
« on: January 18, 2020, 07:07:34 pm »
It seems to me that Zentyal is barely in time of awakening from a too much long nap.

The official documentation, and particularly the mail module documentation, has been improved these last months. There are some new "howtos" about implementing DKIM and PSF in Zentyal (for instance).

But the Ubuntu LTS packages used by Zentyal are quickly getting old, and their update  (which will provide the new features offered by their newest versions like the Password Settings Objects offered by the last samba versions, for example, and probably tons of these little changes necessaries for adapting the different products to the newest standards) could be much more painful than most of the users could believe.

(By the way this issue that you have detected isn't the only one forced by new security policies of the different base packages in these last months. Do you remember the last issues produced by the new OpenSSL CRL policies?)

The proliferation of these new security policies and other kinds of changes imposed by the giants like Google, Mozilla, and others (that are working with really short development cycles) will force the Zentyal developers to make an extra effort to maintain the existent features usable in a "quick and dirty way", that is the key point of Zentyal for a large subset of the  Zentyal Development version users.

To force these users to make "black magic"  on "Mason" templates for maintaining the possibility of working on Gmail from the Zentyal mail module (and the rest of features) could be a heavy stroke for this group of the Zentyal users (if I don't have overrated my own capacities as profiler).

Simply, today young developers learn Python or PHP, not Perl. They work with well-fashioned and documented frameworks, not with a Perl code too much proudly declared as "self-documented". Few young sysadmins use Perl in these days to manage their infrastructures, however how powerful and fun can be Perl for their practitioners.

Here it's the challenge for the Zentyal community. Old sysadmins seem to have lost their interest in Zentyal and new ones don't seem to have the needed professional profile (or personal interest) to contribute to the project developing nor giving support to the other users.

On the other hand, I think (if I judge it through this forum current situation) that the Zentyal community has been too much reduced and probably has lost the minimal critical mass for maintaining the project into the collaborative parameters of a true open source project.

Really only a few people here try to help the rest of users, the developers barely intervene in the forum, young people don't learn Perl and I bet that most of the old valuable users don't even remember their old forum accounts.

This is painful because I have used Zentyal to teach, and learn, systems administration a long time and I know how useful Zentyal can be not only as a production system but as a GNU/Linux learning system.

O let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
And death comes softly stealing on,
How silently!
Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
the pain
The moments that are speeding fast
We heed not, but the past,—the past,
More highly prize.

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