dagwieers

It wasn't abandoned, it didn't see any maintenance for 18 months.

I don't get paid for doing this work. Red Hat does. They get paid for offering it to customers that apparently demands that it ships with RHEL8. They have been shipping it with RHEL since RHEL3.

They haven't contributed to it ever in that timespan.

They could have paid me for maintaining it, they could have offered to maintain it for me. (Because it is a lot of work to accept and verify pull requests). I am a freelancer, I have to work for a living I don't have a lot of free time.

Instead, they ripped out the plugin backend, added the PCP backend and now you can't use it as a drop-in tool that can't run PCP. Your synology NAS, WRT router or JeOS platform. Because Red Hat does not care about anything other than RHEL. They are business-oriented. And that's fine.

Is the Open Source ecosystem better off ? I sincerely doubt it. It's being replaced by paid-for engineers with business interests. In the long term it is killing the community.

It has played out as it did, that's why I closed the project.

I don't have any wishes. Just a bad aftertaste but that will go. I don't like to dwell in the past, regardless of the fact I have to defend myself in this forum to total strangers who seem to know better :-)

And that will pass as well. We'll see...

That's not exactly what happened, but great to see you are making improvements in your fiction-writing skills :-) Keep it up !

Maybe because it is the nice thing to do?

And it's not like I have disappeared from the face of the earth. I am quite active on GitHub.

Well, I had to find out this was planned and acted on after the decision was made and the alternative was written without any regards of the original project.

And that is fine if it would stay pcp-dstat as-is.

The most upsetting to me is that Dstat is no longer a python tool you can drop on a JeOS, Synology NAS or a WRT router to get it to work, you now have to install PCP and all its dependencies to make it work, which goes against the original design goals. (i.e. we used to support Python 1.5 for a long time to accommodate RHEL2.1 during its life-cycle)

Also, by taking the Dstat code, removing the plugin mechanism and replacing it with a PCP backend, writing a python plugin for Dstat is no longer possible. This is promoted as being a feature as "your plugin is now a config file" which is a bit disingenuous as you have to write a PCP backend which is a lot harder.

And it is not even a drop-in replacement, it only implements the built-in counters, not the full set of plugins (i.e. --top plugins are missing). So the argument that it needs to work as-is for existing customers does not hold true either.

By taking that name (with the Red Hat clout) there is no chance of anyone taking over maintenance without having to deal with 2 products using the same name, which I guess is forcing your wish on other distributions too.

Wrt. the change was properly announced. I bet the checklist was properly checked. Or to quote Douglas Adams:

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

I am not really complaining, maybe unsatisfied of the direction it took and the consequences to other distributions without having a say.

But maybe people fancy the new PCP Dstat and accept their losses. In any case, money rules the world, Open Source ran by volunteers is dying and becomes less and less attractive.

And where is the lie?

Maybe you should read the announcement and leave it at that.

I am not sure what you are implying here. I have zero interest in maintaining the project. This was the last blow to a dying project.

The king is dead, long live the king.

There was a discussion in the Github issues. From that it was pretty clear this was a done deal. If the project is no longer maintained, why would they. And they had the PCP reimplementation ready.

You seem to imply there was no communication, and I stopped the project out of the blue. That is a misrepresentation.

Nobody stepped up to take over maintainership, and I don't see anyone doing that now. But if someone wants to try, I can unarchive the project and restore the PRs and issues.

If not, the king is dead, long live the king!

Is that what happened? I remember it differently...

Thanks :-)

Unfair in what way?

They included in RHEL and sold it as part of their product when it suited them, and now they have replaced it because it suited them. That's fine, I don't have to agree.

Huh? Jumping to conclusions while not knowing all the facts. Please read up on the discussions that we had _after_ Red Hat made this decision. Their decision was made, end of discussion.

I am sure they made a sound business decision, and I think as a result of that I made the right personal decision. And here we are now having this meta-discussion with people not having a clue. Welcome !

Nobody stepped up to maintain the project, not even Red Hat. Some people have offered help, and I have send out a few GitHub invitations to people that offered, but no takers.

I assume people offering to help only wanted to see their own contributions merged.

I shouldn't be surprised people here take positions while not having been involved in the project or know the whole history.

In my opinion, stopping the project was the only sensible thing to do at this point. Red Hat replacing the tool with one of their own (which I wholeheartedly disagree with for various reasons) created a dead-end. It's the final blow to a dying project.

Wrt. Python 3 support, I simply did it because it was so easy to do, not because I thought this would be a game-changer. But hey, please do read into whatever fits your narrative :-)

It didn't just slip their mind, they did not really care: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1614277#c7

The decision to do this was made before June 2018, 18 months after the last activity. One of the reasons cited was lack of activity, but that is no thanks to them, I guess.

That is why I am convinced the goal was to replace it from the onset, there was no interest in helping out the project. In fact "no activity" was the right excuse to make their action seem legitimate. Attempting to contact the project could have jeopardized that plan.

They could have just removed "dstat" from the distribution, and added a note that users can now use pcp-dstat. But now they made it impossible for users to add the original dstat. Let alone the support nightmare of having a different tool with the same name. There's no winning this one.

Who lied about this ?

It's pretty clear we didn't accepted any PRs since December 2016 until Red Hat decided to replace our code, which started early June 2018. That's 18 months.

If I am upset about anything, it is this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1614277#c7

As part of archiving the project, I closed all open issues and PRs. That was what Github recommended me to do and I deemed best for everyone involved.

18 months

Yeah, I added python 3 support after I learned that was the main reason for replacing it. It took me less than an hour to make it work on Python 3, including all (but 2) of the plugins.

And given that PCP is using most of the original code, they must have made the same changes to get Python 3 support.

Yes, and the plan to do this was conceived before June 2018.

What language ? It is being quite factual really.

Sure, and Red Hat being paid for RHEL shipping Dstat for a decade could have helped out. But instead they decided to replace it.

And as a result I don't see a point continuing a project with the same name.

> community developers requesting access to help were being ignored

This is not true, I have not been contacted. I learned from Fedora's decision to replace Dstat with PCP months after it was already decided.

So it's not like I have had a choice. The choices I have today are:

1. Continue with a project, while Fedora/RHEL is shipping a tool by the same name (with 90% of my code)

2. Rename the original Dstat project, which would be silly

3. Discontinue the project

Option 3 is the path of least resistance. Option 1 and 2 would not bring any joy. At least someone will be paid for maintaining the tool.

It feels like reiserfs all over again.