Ardour - support only for official builds?

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Lyberta
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Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Lyberta »

So I've stumbled upon a recent drama involving Ardour and learned that devs only support "official" builds. The reasons vary but I see that the only way to get official build is to pay. But they only provide i386 and amd64 builds. I look at debian repo and see alpha amd64 arm64 armel armhf hppa i386 mips mips64el mipsel ppc64 ppc64el s390x sparc64. WTF? I understand that devs may be lazy but outright refusing support? What a dick move.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by tavasti »

Isn't it pretty normal, that when you get packages from distro, you report bugs to that distro?

Easy to understand that if software maker provides some support, that means you have to use build they know and have tested.

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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by rghvdberg »

I've seen numerous occasions on irc that people got help with "unsupported" versions or people getting help compiling the source.
It's not that black and white. More a disclaimer it seems.

Actually I "bought" Ardour because of the excellent support I got with the 'unofficial' version.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Michael Willis »

To be honest, I would prefer that the two primary contributors have more time to develop instead of trying to support broken builds that they didn't even make. They've historically had a lot of issues reported from people running versions of Ardour that were built against different library versions than the official Ardour download. Those kinds of issues are notoriously time consuming to track down.

What other open source project of this magnitude with a team of two do you know about that offers support for any distro-specific build of their project?
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Baggypants »

Lyberta wrote:I understand that devs may be lazy but outright refusing support? What a dick move.
No it's not. It's common and logical. https://blog.centos.org/2018/03/centos- ... s-project/
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by tytel »

The developers have put years of effort they put into an extremely power piece of software that everyone here can get for free. In addition to this, they offer a support option if you pay for the official builds. They don't *owe* you support (that's written into the GPL), but they offer it under the conditions that they are straightforward with.

I assure you, the devs are not lazy. They are very dedicated developers and extremely valuable members of this community.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by raboof »

Lyberta wrote:I understand that devs may be lazy but outright refusing support? What a dick move.
I think it is very harmful to criticize open source maintainers for "not doing enough". We should be thankful that they're putting their energy towards the project at all, and I don't think it's fair to expect any support. Searching for "open source entitlement" might turn up some good articles on this topic.

That said, it is of course great and healthy that they do support the project. I think it makes sense that they're being clear and up-front about in what cases they can realistically look into requests for help.

It is not unreasonable to ask people to, when they are running a package built by a distro instead of directly from upstream, to go to the distro packager for help first. For example, Debian also encourages this, as documented in https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by tavasti »

I agree with previous posters. If you create great software, it is up to you decide how and what you support. And if you have some subscription model, still you can decide what are terms of support.

In general, only feasible way to support software with decent amount of work is to limit support to some defined set of configurations. This is one big reason why not so many software houses don't support linux. And even for linux-houses like RedHat: for example their Openstack support will soon be limited to installations where configuration is managed with their own director. So if you will make configuration by yourself, even all the parts are official RH software, they won't support it.

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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by gimmeapill »

I am calling BS here.

The Ardour bugtracker has 2600+ open entries some that are untouched for 10y+ years.
http://tracker.ardour.org/view_all_bug_ ... _number=54

This is not how a healthy open source project looks like. This is not how Professional Support looks like.
I don't think Ardour support is anywhere where it claims to be. The bug tracker is a graveyard & this gives a bad image of the project.

If the particular build is not supported, or if support is only provided to paying subscribers (or against a bounty) - it shouldn't be that hard to manage customers expectations. Choose a support policy, communicate it to your users and apply it.

Not triaging bugs is discouraging for bug reporters, regardless of the support status of the build their are running.
It is also probably not helping visibility for the devs to spot hot issues.

I get that developer time is scarce, and no one likes to do support - fair enough.
But seriously, it doesn't take a genius to clean up a bug tracker: close everything opened up to version N-1 with a polite canned answer.

Example:

Code: Select all

"Dear reporter, the entry you opened affected an older version of Ardour, and we have to assume it is not relevant anymore. 
Therefore we will close the ticket as part of our great autumnal bug tracker cleaning initiative.
Should the issue you reported be still actual, please accept our apologies and open a new report against the current stable/Supported version of Ardour".
Close the stuff that is not going to get fixed, & start fresh.
Take one hour or two to do that once a year (set up a google reminder if that's too difficult), no one gets harmed.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by tavasti »

gimmeapill wrote: The Ardour bugtracker has 2600+ open entries some that are untouched for 10y+ years.
http://tracker.ardour.org/view_all_bug_ ... _number=54

This is not how a healthy open source project looks like. This is not how Professional Support looks like.
Other end of support: (not related to Ardour)
- Create one big bug, and close bugs as duplicate that are covered with that
- After 1.5 years, close that big bug 'because it's too broad. Please raise a new issue if you have a specific problem, including as much detail as possible.'

https://github.com/symless/synergy-core ... -426506526

:-)

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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by gimmeapill »

tavasti wrote:
gimmeapill wrote: Other end of support: (not related to Ardour)
- Create one big bug, and close bugs as duplicate that are covered with that
- After 1.5 years, close that big bug 'because it's too broad. Please raise a new issue if you have a specific problem, including as much detail as possible.'

https://github.com/symless/synergy-core ... -426506526

:-)
Ouch, that's aiming low :D
To their defense, it looks like the support folks changed in the meantime, so probably the bug triaging policy as well.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by English Guy »

The sense of entitlement in a couple of the posts here is breathtaking.

If you are not happy you can always exercise your free choice not to use it
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Jack Winter »

I fail to see how writing open source software, in any way mandates that you support it...
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Michael Willis »

English Guy wrote:breathtaking
Now it only I could write the breathtaking music that I dream about...
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by gimmeapill »

Jack Winter wrote:I fail to see how writing open source software, in any way mandates that you support it...
Writing open source software does not in any way mandates that the author(s) provide also support (especially for free).
But then, there is no point in opening a publicly accessible bug tracker and asking users to report issues.
https://ardour.org/reporting_bugs

It is all about consistency.

Again, it is nothing that a bit of old bug triaging wouldn't solve (= batch closing as "won't fix" anything older than a year or so).
Which in turn would probably bump up the usefulness of the bug tracker as a centralized source of user feedback for developers.
Rotting bug trackers rarely give a good impression about a project - open source or not.
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