Di.Day #DidIt checklist:
โ Mailserver ported to Dovecot 2.4, minor features added
โ Family #nextcloud updated to 31.0.12
โ Family #Mastodon updated to 4.5.3
Maybe not as glorious and impacting as you folks leaving X, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and others for open, distributed, community-driven alternatives - but ops folks need celebrations for their little successes, too.
Mailserver automation maintenance took more effort than expected; newer Alpine releases exclusively ship Dovecot 2.4.x,which changed the config file syntax. Upgrading from 2.3.x left me with quite a mess. But hey, "Carpe juggulum", as pterry used to say.
Seized the opportunity and added a "trickle" feature for throttled sending of bulk messages to sensitive providers, as per @mwl 's insightful "Run your own Mail server" book.
My automation is FOSS and available here: https://github.com/t-lo/mailserver
#Nextcloud sadly continues its long held tradition of major apps not being available for the most recent release: NC32 lacks support for maps, duplicate finder, Jitsi integration and others, making it not viable to update to.
So it's 31.0.12 for now.
#mastodon updates like a charm, no issues ๐ค . Updated our self-hosted translation service powered by #LibreTranslate while I was at it, now running v1.8.3 with pre-built language models included (available here: https://github.com/t-lo/LibreTranslate-ghcr-publisher/pkgs/container/libretranslate).
While LibreTranslate isn't quite as powerful as web-based services of major players, it can be self-hosted and it entirely suffices for short text snippets posted on the Fediverse.
Nextcloud apps are made by 3rd parties, and largely volunteer. As with all opensource, the correct response to "this feature is missing/broken" is to fix it and submit the pull-request ๐
As this is most often not feasible, the second best response is patient understanding, and perhaps a donation.
We build this stuff for ourselves and each other. Those who cut their computing teeth at the teat of Microsoft or Apple may find this an odd concept, but please understand that BEFORE Mrs Gates pulled favours with IBM to install her money-grubbing son, our method was the norm.
The only 'stake' is "does it do what I need".
Of course, you could use your wealth to fund your community management team! That is essentially what the nc core is.
@teledyn I was more hoping for active development support for upcoming major releases during the -rc period for, say, the 50 most widely installed apps. And since we're talking money, the business justification would be to lower maintenance burden for downstream users and customers of Nextcloud (the company) services alike.
Even Collabora gets this (nextcloud is an important platform for them) and contributes: https://github.com/nextcloud/maps/pull/1480
When I started in commercial corporate computing in the 80's it was NORMAL to assign several employees devoted to participating in the opensource critical to their business. We put young minds to exclusively work on gcc, Xwindows, libc, databases &c. IBM pumped millions into Linux because THEY needed it on the AS400!
In my experience, employers in this century simply feel entitled and bitch a lot. I would like to see one them write something similar themselves ๐คฃ
To further inspire you to do this, read up on the history of Linux distros, esp how RedHat went from a struggling start-up to owning major league sports teams! ๐
teledyn ๐