I think @seeLive has something here. One of the problems I have with OpenHab is that the learning curve is very steep. It is very hard to get into, especially for users who are not super technical. The introduction, tutorials and documentation are filled with technical jargon that many people won’t understand at first.
People learn things in different ways, there is not one approved way to teach yourself something. “RTFM” is one method, follow a tutorial, and ask for help on the forums are others.
The one major method I see missing from OH is the “take a working example, and modify it to your needs” method. You will learn a lot doing this, and you can always go back to the working example to figure out where you went wrong. Providing a non-working example configuration with OH does not help in this respect (and I don’t think that it’s intentional - it did work in OH1 - it’s just never been updated).
It can be very frustrating for new users to have to spend hours with configurations, flipping between paper UI and text files with no clear indication as to which is the 'best" way of doing things (and everyone has their own opinion on this). In many cases just to get one Item working.
What I see @seeLive has done with SARAH is to provide a way to make a working example, that is relevant to your own particular situation. It gives you a springboard to set up something that works quickly, that you can then take and use as a learning tool to explore the capabilities of OH and how it works.
As such I think it is a commendable effort, and fills a hole in the OH learning curve.
Could there be issues? sure, there are in most new things, but I think we should see this in a positive light, it’s another tool to help people get started. One that I think is very much needed.
While there is a bit of a demo built-in to the OH install, it is something very different. It does not provide the same level of functioning home and I don’t think that was the intent. The two should not be confused as being the same thing.
Although your intent is noble, they are just 2 different “Demo” approaches, neither of which would be useful in my small installation. There are just too many permutations and combinations of things to be helpful to everybody.
I have one motion controlled light with an expire timer to turn off, but only when it is dark.
I have another light on stairs with 3 motion sensors and an expire timer to turn off. (top & bottom of stairs and outside an office area.)
It takes individual effort to put such things together. The individual needs to know HOW each piece works so they can troubleshoot. That is why we focus here on helping people develop their OWN solutions.
Just wanted to add some late comments and offer another viewpoint to the - very respectful, I must say! - debate above on third-party alternatives/complements to the officially maintained distribution or its components, or those which intended to be but didn’t make the cut for whatever reason:
IMHO I think it’s fine and even should be encouraged, and I believe the general principle should be “don’t piggyback on openHAB’s brand or community for your personal (or your project’s) gain.” This is especially true of the former since the openHAB name and logo are trademarks (or pending) and you’re limited in their re-use - there should be an official policy for that but it’s not ready yet.
This doesn’t seem to be what @seeLive is doing, and being an active community member on this forum, questions or support about SARAH will probably end up being handled by its author anyways (maybe after a mention by someone one).
What I’m more ambivalent about is cases like these:
As you may or may not know there’s been a fork of HABPanel to work with ioBroker (a completely different platform), and since the original version features a widget gallery getting its data from here, they’ve reimplemented the gallery API to make it work and keep using openHAB’s forum as a source; as a result, there are links in the app effectively sending their users here - hence these few cases of users, sometimes unaware of the difference between ioBroker’s fork and openHAB, but still seeking support.
Technically there’s nothing illegal in this, and I know there isn’t any foul play intended, but doing it without notifying the upstream project or being more clear that you’re sending users to another community could have been handled better IMO. I don’t see anything of the sort happening here with SARAH.
