I will say that one of the frustrating parts for me lately has been that I’ve (for the first time in a long time, really) been learning new things, and excited to be making progress on a chunk of code. Not only was I a hair’s breadth away from having Insteon messages accepted and updating state inside OpenHAB, but I can see several really intriguing potential improvements that might give some plausible automatic device detection and no longer require some of the extra manual steps that the Insteon 1.x binding did.
Then I’ve spent all my spare time for weeks spinning my wheels on a mysterious build problem. It’s been hugely frustrating, and that frustration led to this post.
I will also unashamedly admit to having framed the concern in a slightly exaggerated way with a deliberately provocative title to try and get people to read the message and reply. That part seems to have worked.
J-N-K: I’m very glad you chose to write a second post with more explanation in it, because your first was… unpleasant.
I do understand your point about everyone all being volunteers, and I do respect that. I don’t expect immediate response either - I’ve been struggling with this issue for a couple of weeks, and searching the forums shows similar errors happening somewhat regularly since at least May. None of those forum threads had an applicable answer, although some got solved. Others simply never got any response at all.
A few days ago, one of the other maintainers linked to the github thread and said, “… there are non-reproducible problems with dependency resolution through m2e - as you can see from the comments on openhab/openhab-distro#927, they occur out of nothing and nobody really knows how to get rid off them :-(.” This suggested to me that nobody knew what was going on, and no one knows how to fix it. That’s a really bad place to be, and it must be addressed.
This was not intended to be “help me now!!!1!!” but to try and get a response to my perception that this is a recurring issue with no known solution, that no one is getting responses for. And, from the unanswered threads on the forums, a serious problem that is going to prevent development of new bindings.
Andrew_Rowe: Thanks for linking in those very good threads with the history of how we got to be here. That’s very helpful!
rlkoshak: Thanks for pointing out some details I had missed. I had heard the suggestion of federating the two systems, but it was nothing like an accepted or developed proposal. Hearing there is a way to keep using the older bindings is positive and means a little less pressure to replace them all, but doesn’t make developing 2.x bindings any easier at the moment.
I’m also really surprised at the 1.x poll that there’s a dozen or less people using Insteon. Considering how well it works (really well!) and that it’s a stable and established product, I expected a lot more people to be using it. To be honest, this suggests to me that the forum doesn’t reach a huge number of users who are just happily using the system without problems, and that any decisions we make based on the forum users are likely to be skewed to “power users” and possibly early adopters. This is a common problem.
This is definitely true, and I haven’t been as good about it as I could. I have not found it easy to talk to the developers on github, and they are often working at a depth of understanding I can’t follow. Still, it’s where more of the right people are, but getting involved there seems to have a big learning curve that the forums lack.
My perception is colored by the forums, and that seems to suggest that there’s a lot of uncertainty and little resolution in several important issues.
Others have said some or parts of this, but not as a new thread with a scary title. I felt it needed to be read and discussed.
