TVHeadend-changes afoot apparently

Jonas Lang · 2023-12-07T13:18:28+00:00

Came across this post today. Interesting that users of this forum are hearing this announcement first from a totally different source. https://forum.libreele...

Flole

The plan is to eventually retire this redmine instance and switch this forum into read-only mode. A forum with a more modern UI and (most importantly) better anti spam measures will replace it. It runs on a dedicated server, so it's not tied to any other project.

Issues will be managed through GitHub in the future.

There is now an opencollective account to collect donations for project related things (hosting, domain, maybe one day even test hardware purchases).

There have been lots of changes to reduce the "single person responsibilities", so with the new changes it should be possible to continue operation and development even if one of the administrative members disappears.

Additionally the way releases are done will be changed to rolling releases. No more backports.

I don't think that post was made as a "statement of intent", it seems more like a "things will get better soon". After all this isn't super-secret stuff, and a proper announcement will be posted here first once everything is ready (which will take more time).

@Jonas: If you want to join the team that gets the new forum running you're more than welcome to do so!

chewitt

Lack of update post is a group failing, though in our group defence: at the point where the forum came up again it was not clear how or who was behind it, and while some things have clearly needed to be done there were no firm plans (or a group to agree on them) and thus few facts to communicate. Since then we started to organise, build to-do lists, and I've made progress on some of the obvious infrastructure tasks. However it seemed sensible to have a few more things in a reportable state before posting, and ideally we'd post to the 'news' section of the website for maximum visibility 'but' that needs admin rights and Andreas disappeared again before granting them, so we've been busy while waiting for him to reappear and .. time has elapsed. We appologise.

https://opencollective/tvheadend is live since yesterday evening so we can raise/spend donations in a transparent way. We even have our first donation :)

https://new.tvheadend.org is the current forum/website replacement sandbox. The focus is on functional things not content, so any posts or info pages seen there are WIP or just for test (don't assume anything). Proper FAQ and Getting Started type content is one area where wiki/mod people need to help out and own tasks. The project also needs to rationalise the number of places it provides info from because there are too many places and odd bits of info and this results in confusion (where to look?) and a lack of documentation maintenance (where to do it?). Documenation is a persistent challenge in most projects because it's almost always more fun to do stuff than write about it.

@DaveH please send me an email (chewitt@tvheadend domain)

Jonas Lang

Please don’t take this up the wrong way but this is an open source project with input from volunteers not some commercial entity preparing submissions for a possible buyout by some multinational corporation. You might want to cool the jets a little.

Clearly for whatever reason the majority of the original founders of the TVH project do not want to be contacted for whatever reason. It still hasn’t been established if in fact there are any possible licensing/permissions issue to be considered and if this has already been addressed I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Once again you are referring to “we” yet us, the membership are not in fact aware of who makes up the “we” collective.

I have seen so many projects with great intentions go by the wayside. As they do say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In fact one that appears to be close to your heart LibreELEC has been through at least three iterations mainly due to internal squabbling if I’m to believe this

https://www.reddit.com/r/libreELEC/comments/e6qfne/what_is_the_difference_between_coreelec_and/?rdt=42331

I certainly wouldn’t like to see this happen to the TVH project.

Transparency is the key to any successful project and it’s vital that any changes to way the TVH project is managed needs to be transmitted clearly to the stakeholders ie the membership/user base. There may be back channels already opened and discussion appears to be at an advanced stage but remember you provide the membership with a solution they want and not what you feel they should get.

chewitt

There is now a working matterbridge integration between the #hts IRC channel on Libera.Chat and team-chat on Discord

chewitt

Translations are now here: https://app.transifex.com/tvheadend - the change is: the URL no longer references a foundation entity that never existed. This breaks references in the codebase, but translations haven't been updated in either direction since ~2016 anyway so we can resolve that [sic] when reassociating things. There are more references to the foundation to find and correct. If people spot them, please change them (if you have rights or ability to) or flag them so we can document and work through a to-do list.

chewitt

The tvheadend.org domain registration has now been transfered to Cloudflare. The domain is still nominally held in Andreas' name but there are now multiple people (including Andreas) with the ability to access and manage it moving forwards. As part of the transfer the domain was renewed for 12-months.

chewitt

We now have full admin access to this server and can start exploring our options to export or dump users and other content for import to a new forum. Users should be simple to move over. Everything else is probably a large and complicated effort as Redmine is not blessed with rich export options. TBC.

NB: This site is also accessible on https://old.tvheadend.org now in preparation for being put into a read-only state at some future point.

Jonas Lang

Could you now indicate to the membership here exactly who you are referring to when you reference “we”.

Obviously we the members would not like to see a repeat of what happened when the previous “we” for some reason were no longer participating in the project, were the only people with administrative access to the forum and later became uncontactable.

A simple name and probably an email address is possibly the best method of contact in the event of any new forum going down. I do recommend giving administrative rights to members who are actually active on the forum too. Clearly that makes sense.

While not overly necessary a clear link to the TVH GitHub would help for those who do use TVH but neither self build nor contribute to the TVH code or development.

chewitt

I can't speak for what happened in the past, but it's obvious to me (perhaps more so due to being a relative outsider) that there's not been direct communication between the leaders of the project and anyone else trying to meaningfully contribute. That's already been corrected and "we" are 6-8 people plus some lurkers with history. It's up to the individuals to out themselves if they choose to, but all the names will be familiar to forum and GitHub watchers. Again, I'm not intending to lead the project. It just needs some (re)organisation and the right tools to function independently, and a healthy level of anarchy encouraged to ensure it moves in a forwards direction.

noggin

Just catching up on this as a long-time TV Headend user who helped out a bit at times (and supported Adam Sutton a bit when he was developing)

Glad that someone is sorting some of this stuff out - as the project has sometimes felt a bit abandonware at times. Happy to assist as much as time permits.

chewitt

Changes were made yesterday evening to align owner/admin access and permissions to several project services with the active team. Recent changes already added current team members so this was mostly cleanup to remove access from those contributors who haven't been active in a long time. Notifications were sent to anyone impacted by the changes.