[Jack-Devel] Status of the jackaudio.org homepage (bad news)

Hello users and developers of JACK, recently, there have been a lot more questions and remarks about the jackaudio.org homepage and the releases, especially of jack2. Since most of these questions and remarks are entirely justified, this mail (bad news) will provide some insight I have about the current situation of the page, the release process and how all these things did happen up to now. This is a long mail, only read it if it is really relevant to you. 1 the page The main part of the current homepage for JACK ( jackaudio.org ) is a set of static html pages, generated from markdown files with jekyll [1]. The whole build process for the static page is compatible to the GitHub pages [2] infrastructure, which means it can be built completely with and without GitHub and as well as deployed as a GitHub page. Further details can be obtained from the README in the GitHub repository. The page also contains a html version of the JACK API documentation and some of the tutorials and Information were moved to a Wiki provided by GitHub. The sources[3] for the page are hosted as a dedicated repository on GitHub under the jackaudio organization, together with jack1 and jack2. Attached to the repository, you can also find the mentioned Wiki[4]. There is also a dedicated bug tracker for the page attached to the repository of the homepage on GitHub. 2 webpage hosting The page is currently hosted on a webspace owned by Paul Davis, who also owns the jackaudio.org domain. To my best knowledge, only Paul and Stèpahe Letz have currently access to the webspace. Hosting the page on this webspace instead of using the GitHub pages infrastructure directly was a decision made for various reasons. The domain is also associated to the jack mailing lists which made it difficult at that time (2014) to point the domain to GitHub pages instead. Having a page that was not dependent on the GitHub pages infrastructure was a requirement at the time we transitioned from a broken and hacked Drupal installation to a static page. 3 webpage development and deployment The GitHub repository is currently maintained by me with help in form of bug reports, pull requests and edits of the wiki from the community. If I determine (by the rule of thumb) that enough changes to the page have accumulated or a release of jack1 or jack2 occurs, I prepare the page to be pulled and basically send a pull request to the jack-devel mailing list, signalling that the github repo should be pulled to the webspace. Since the page is designed in a way to be compatible with GitHub pages and already set up to work as a GitHub page, it became accessible under the github domain [5], which was nice for development purposes and was supposed to serve as a preview before pulling changes to the webspace. 4 The case of JACK release binaries The page also links to release binaries and source tarballs of jack1 and jack2 (at least it's supposed to). These binaries are not included in the git repository since having multiple large binaries inside the repository would make it unfriendly to clone, especially after a few releases. Multiple approaches to hosting the binaries have been discussed. Paul did upload the binaries for jack1 to the mentioned webspace after a release. For jack2, Stéphane decided to use DropBox public files to host the release binaries. The use of tags on the respective repositories of jack1 and jack2 was discussed multiple times. Attaching the release binaries to tags could have solved the hosting problem. Still, there was the requirement to be independent from GitHub so this idea was not followed through. Also GitHub LFS was considered but wasn't ready and released by GitHub in 2014/2015 and also wouldn't really have resolved the issue of depending on GitHub, since the files would have still been hosted on GitHub infrastructure. On a new release, the maintainers would announce new links to the binaries and I would update the site accordingly. It required manual intervention but since release cycles were already long I wasn't too worried about that. 5 how it all came down Over time minor challenges arose. Sometimes it was just GitHub changing some configuration for their jelkyll configuration, sometimes DropBox would limit the number of Downloads, sometimes it would take a few days longer or required a second reminder to get my changes puled to the webspace. At some point Paul decided to step down as the lead developer of jack1 but keeping the webspace and the domain online. Reaction times for getting changes to the webspace became longer (at least it felt like that to me) and then also DropBox terminated their free hosting of public shares. At that point a lot of people were also asking for an update of the jack2 installer on OSX. The whole thing resulted in multiple questions on the mailinglists, reports in bugtrackers all over place on lists and bugtrackers I didn't even knew I was subscribed to, someone even managed to use the review feature on a commit of the jack repo. I did some mitigation on the bugtrackers and after some time went by I made a grave mistake. I went ahead and grabbed the old binaries from archive.org, created tags for the releases of jack2 for windows and OSX on the repository of the homepage and attached the files to these tags. I updated the links on the page, did some additional maintenance and requested the changes to be pulled to the webspace on the jack-devel list. That was intended to be an intermediate solution but you may have already guessed that one part of my mistake: There is a saying, that intermediate solutions are the ones that will never go away, so sad, so true. Second, attaching the binaries to the repo of the webpage confused a lot of people since normally the tag would have been attached to a commit of the jack2 repository. When a tag is created, GitHub automatically creates a source tarball and zip for the respective commit, so that a developer only has to attach the release binaries. I could no do this, since a have no access to the jack2 repository. The problem is, that users do not expect to find the releases attached to the repository of the homepage and also, if you take a look at these tags [6], you will notice that they have the source tarballs of the homepage attached where a user would normally expect the source tarball of jack2. It's a mess right now more so because shortly afterwards I received a release of the new installer for OSX and Windows and now there is another release that uses this suboptimal solution and the old page on the webspace still has the DropBox links. I updatetd the links on the page in the GitHub repo accordingly, hoping that people would search for the binaries on the page after it was (supposed to be) pulled, requested the changes to be pulled to the webspace... that was half a month ago and there was apparently no pull. So that's how we ended up with broken dropbox links on the webspace (jackaudio.org), two* versions of the page (jackaudio. org and [5]) and a whole lot of confusion and frustration about source tarballs containing strange markdown files and not the jack2 source code. The technical problems are actually not that hard to solve, but a think wen have an organizational problem here. There will be a follow up (good news) to this mail where I propose some ways to clear this mess and how to avoid it in the future, it may be a base for discussion and LAC should be a good opportunity to get this sorted out since the most important decision makers will be there. best regards Markus * To be more correct and as a very observant user mentioned, there are three versions since the gh-pages branch of the repo also gets special treatment (see GitHub pages docs for details) but that is not that much relevant for this topic. [1] http://jekyllrb.com/ [2] https://pages.github.com/ [3] https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com [4] https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki [5] https://jackaudio.github.io/ [6] https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/releases PS: It's already 1 AM and I am still *jacked* and *pun*ching