Hello, Open Source is a fantastic success story, and shows every sign of becoming a gigantic snow ball over the next few years. Usage of Bacula is increasing significantly, which is very pleasing. However, the development side of Bacula, with one or two exceptions, I consider a total failure.
Bacula has received quite a number of submissions other than my contributions over the years. However, in general, these submissions have been made without documentation (leaving it to me to document) and the developer after a short time has for various reasons moved on to other things (change of job, change of life status, other interests, ...). All this is normal, but what I find very disappointing is that with only a couple of exceptions that come to mind there are no permanent Bacula developers other than myself. (Just so that there is no confusion or ill feelings, Scott, Dan, and Eric have been around for quite a while and have and are making significant contributions -- there are certainly others who don't come to mind immediately, so, please accept my appologies -- also, I think the users list is working quite well. What I am talking about is the lack of highly qualified, committed, and "permanent" Bacula developers). My point here, is that today, I am essentially the only developer doing documentation, the only developer fixing bugs, the only developer doing testing on the different platforms. After 7+ years of doing it 12-14 hours a day for 6 and sometimes 7 days a week, I am more than a bit disappointed that there isn't more help. The fault may possibly be my own, but what ever the case may be that is where we are. As an example of what I am lamenting here is that there is a Win 2003 bug open since 20 March where restore of encrypted (and compressed if I remember right) data fails. Another example is that despite my repeated requests over something like a six month period, no one (at this moment) has "signed up" to do Win32, Solaris, or FreeBSD regression testing. My solution to this problem is several fold: 1. As of release 2.2.0, Win32, Solaris, and FreeBSD will no longer be "officially" supported platforms. So that there is no misunderstanding, I definitely would like to see them supported, but I am no longer going to do it alone, which means that I will accept patches for them, I will not accept bug reports that are specific to those platforms, they will be documented as "use if it works for you but don't complain if it doesn't", and the project will no longer supply binaries for the Director and Storage daemon for Win32. Users can build it themselves if they want to use it. 2. I previously suggested creating a formal Bacula Open Source project or a foundation, but I have totally dropped that idea due to lack of community participation. 3. As of today, the gnome-console (renamed bgnome-console) and wx-console (renamed bwx-console) are deprecated and no longer supported by me. If someone else wants to pick up support of them, I'll be very happy to accept patches. 4. I am no longer personally going to maintain the projects list (Feature Requests). If someone wants to pick up maintaining it including the voting, I would be very happy. Obviously I'll continue to work on projects that personally interest me. 5. I will be devoting more of my time to a project that I previously mentioned that will provide training and support for Bacula engineers and for 3rd party Bacula Service organizations. The support provided will not be direct customer support but certification and level 3 support for professional service companies with the goal of promoting Bacula usage and code submissions. The concept here is that I am convinced that commercial organizations want to use Bacula (many use Solaris, so it is critical for them) but are hindered by the lack of qualified professional service. By insuring professional services for Bacula, I believe that we can compensate for the lack of commuity participation in the Bacula development process. This is because commerical/governmental/educational organizations will make significant contributions to the project when they have professional support. Best regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
