Is ZeroTier failing
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@adam-ierymenko said in Is ZeroTier failing:
No we are not dead. Quite the opposite. We're growing a lot and have been very busy.
(1) We did finally push a Chocolatey package update but it got kicked back. We're going to have to institute more of a process for maintaining our vast surface area of ports and packages. It's horribly annoying since every package manager and package repository has its own unique way of being a pain in the you-know-what.
(2) Windows auto-updates as of 1.2.0. 1.2.6 will be coming pretty soon.
(3) Yes we did rev our community system yet again. We're trying to iterate toward something as low-friction and interactive as possible.
The chocolatey package was never approved and then abandoned by @adam-ierymenko
I emailed a general support inquiry to chocolatey and had a very helpful response.
tl;dr: We'd be happy to help Adam get this through to a trusted status, but it does need to be a silent install. And what he's mentioned twice for driver install is a solved problem among quite a few packages - driver installs can be silent. We've pointed to the Virtualbox package as an example, but there are others that do the same as well.
Feel free to read over the notes from the rejected version, especially near the end - we've given Adam a direct link to an existing package that installs a driver and asked him to look closer. If folks can't be bothered, there is not much we can do, but as Gary indicated, the community repository is meant to have high quality packages that install completely silently. That can sometimes be challenging because Windows and weirdness, but we haven't received much feedback from Adam about why he is not able to look into emulating what other packages do. We really haven't received much feedback at all.
Check it out: https://chocolatey.org/packages/zerotier-one/1.2.4
And for context, this is the notes we left in the previous version from a year before:
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I looked at the VirtualBox packages, and I have some thoughts, but do not know enough.
According to the Chocolatey team, this is not hard and it seems to me that ZeroTier just does not care as they never followup.
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You're partly right. We get requests to support literally dozens of platforms and package managers, and Chocolatey is making things hard. It's also not something we get a lot of requests for, so it gets bumped to the back of the line behind... too many targets to list. We've considered just pulling the package.
The ZeroTIer Windows installer as it stands was not easy to build at all. It involved the use of a $1000+ product called Advanced Installer (the only installer maker that even came close to our needs) combined with weeks of developer time to put together a package. The MSI is designed to install on both 32 and 64 bit machines and to handle a huge variety of edge cases and Windows "spins."
We can look into silent installing drivers but as with absolutely everything else about Windows packaging I'm sure it's painful. Windows is by a huge margin the most painful platform to build an installer for unless your app is trivial. (Debian based Linux comes in second.)
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Personally I suspect that Chocolatey will die now that Windows has the Linux subsystem for developers.
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Forgot to mention... not only is the Windows installer the product of a lot of work but we are reluctant to touch it. Every single time we touch it we get problem reports since every Windows machine is a special snowflake with special requirements.
The whole Windows installer subsystem should be burned. Then the ashes should be mixed with copious amounts of water and injected into a deep subsurface well in a geographically stable region to ensure that they remain sequestered for thousands of years and do not harm future civilizations. Unfortunately MS would have to do this.
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@adam-ierymenko said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Personally I suspect that Chocolatey will die now that Windows has the Linux subsystem for developers.
The Linux subsystem for developers runs in a container, and can have no interaction with the actual OS. So while it would be great to have the most time-tested and robust package management systems available for Windows, that just doesn't exists outside of Chocolatey yet.
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@adam-ierymenko said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Personally I suspect that Chocolatey will die now that Windows has the Linux subsystem for developers.
Huh? How do two totally different and disconnected things like that relate? Linux Subsystem doesn't replace the need for package management in any way. I'm so lost here.
And Microsoft has started to not just like Chocolatey but embrace it and make it the official channel for some of their stuff.
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@adam-ierymenko said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Forgot to mention... not only is the Windows installer the product of a lot of work but we are reluctant to touch it.
I'm not sure how to take this. But this sounds like you've just given up on ZeroTier because it's too hard to install?
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@adam-ierymenko said in Is ZeroTier failing:
The whole Windows installer subsystem should be burned.
I'm not a big Windows fan, but given the weird confusion and problems with not understanding the Linux Subsystem and not handling Chocolatey, this suggests to me that maybe your team doesn't know Windows well enough and has become subject to some FUD and perceive problems that are not there. Not that the Windows installer system is known for being good, but giving up on your product because you can't figure out how to install it? Really?
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and today the monitoring system is obviously failing because:
But I can't do anything about it because their awesome "better" community (aka crappy slack integration with website) does not work...
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Do you have to pay to get access to the community?
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@scottalanmiller said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Do you have to pay to get access to the community?
No, but the site is broken as @JaredBusch indicated. I can only get a message to show up by using the search option in the upper right.
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@danp said in Is ZeroTier failing:
@scottalanmiller said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Do you have to pay to get access to the community?
No, but the site is broken as @JaredBusch indicated. I can only get a message to show up by using the search option in the upper right.
I can't even find a link to it. And I'm signed in.
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From what I can tell, Slack is down generally.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is ZeroTier failing:
@danp said in Is ZeroTier failing:
@scottalanmiller said in Is ZeroTier failing:
Do you have to pay to get access to the community?
No, but the site is broken as @JaredBusch indicated. I can only get a message to show up by using the search option in the upper right.
I can't even find a link to it. And I'm signed in.
just FYI top right corner.
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And 48 notices since 4:13 am. The site is not down.
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237 emails and uncounted text messages since Saturday @ 4am.
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Sounds like maybe they are having a problem?
