Tvheadend

Andreas Smas the project founder is still the underlying "owner" of most things, with infrastructure for the project entangled among other home/work/side-project things of his, and over time as maintainers have come and gone his need to be restrictive with rights/permissions has resulted in the people with access not being active, and the active people having limited or no permissions/rights. As a result, when things have gone down it's not been clear who's running things, who has access, etc. and it's taken time for the message to filter through to the one (super busy) person who can fix the problem.

I've now inserted myself in the process and have been in direct contact with Andreas alongside Florian (Flole998, the closest we have to a project lead) and a few other names around the project to start the process of documenting infrastructure/accounts/credentials and separating things. DNS for the domain is now running in a new Cloudflare account that we have full rights over (registrar transfer still to be done, but will happen soon hopefully) which is important since it's essential for moving things around. There are new accounts with a number of other services and things the project needs to function. All the important (but private) info is being stored in a central 1Password account (we applied for and now have a free FOSS account) and we aim to have multiple active/contactable people with admin/superuser/owner rights to everything so continuity isn't an issue again. At some point we also need to remove rights from those no longer around too, as that's a security issue.

There is a private Discord channel running so that there's some real-time 'team' chat so people are aware of what I'm up to (and can give input and own tasks) and I've reached out to past maintainers and anyone who I could find an email address for who's been active on here and GitHub in the last year. The number of current acceptances is small, and the number of people active in the chat is smaller (some lurkers). You're on my list of people to invite, but I can't trace an email for you; we don't (yet) have proper admin access to this Redmine site (we asked, but Andreas has been offline for a week again) so we can't look people up in the user DB. If you'd like to drop me a note on chewitt@tvheadend (domain) I'll ping you a link.

I have no agenda towards Kodi/LibreELEC and Tvheadned direction. I'm simply someone in the ecosystem of the project with time on his hands and experience in handling all the back-office setup and organisational stuff that keeps a FOSS project afloat (and that nobody else is doing). I'm not planning to run or lead the project. I am planning to sort out some of its underlying issues and point it in a better direction.

One of the issues is, wherever you look, the project looks half-abandoned. It's not dead, but with a website where the most recent news post is 6-years old, a wiki full of outdated links and info, three sets of documenation that's mostly two releases behind, and an overly basic forum (missing all the admin/security tools you need, and looking like something from 2008) fuels persistent rumours of the project being in steep decline. Updating Redmine and the server it runs on would be nice but ultimately doesn't solve most of the admin/security/governance problems, so it will be a team decision to make, but it's days are proably numbered and my post in the LE forums is optimistic that we get to do that sooner than later. We do need to get DB access here (depends on Andreas) before we can take a decision on whether a migration is technically possible or at all sensible, or perhaps we simply grandfather it (make it read-only) for a while so content can be transferred (copy/paste) while something new starts to thrive.

The forum is only one of the jigsaw pieces needed to move the project down the long dark tunnel towards the bright light where a v4.4 release occurs. I hope you reach out.

Christian

Offering a little more to this from the perspective of a relatively old hand here ...

The underlying reason that Christian (and others) stepped in is that the forum went down again, and nobody had any way of bringing it back without chasing ghosts of previous project leads. There was a very public conversation about that on GitHub: https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/pull/1569. Perhaps that should have been on the forum, but, well, broken.

In trying to get things back up, it became apparent that ownership of various components - Redmine, GitHub repos, binary sources, DNS records, Transifex, etc. - was scattered over multiple different people, none of whom are currently active on the project, or even potentially contactable. So it rapidly became imperative to put some structure around these if the project was to remain alive: much more a case of resuscitation than takeover.

Shifting to new platforms - and potentially archiving this forum - offers the potential to plug forum/wiki security holes, stamp out the spammers, and draw a line under ancient and unaddressed bug reports that nobody is around to fix. Could we have done better in announcing it? Yes, certainly, but there's no malice here, and the lack of announcement simply reflects the flurry of activity to try to get things under control before something breaks again. It's genuinely a case of a few interested people desperately trying to do something for a project they care about lest it simply fall into disrepair.

Volunteers - code contributors, wiki folks, forum mods, interested parties - are all welcome. It takes a village to run an open source project, and nobody has the time to do it alone.

I'm glad to see things are happening, and I may be able to help in little ways as time goes by. One thing I would like to see fairly quickly is to see a place where progress is posted, and requests can be made for help (edit: about the project, I mean), or help can be volunteered etc. Maybe this thread can be continued for that for the time being?

Dave H wrote:

I'm glad to see things are happening, and I may be able to help in little ways as time goes by. One thing I would like to see fairly quickly is to see a place where progress is posted, and requests can be made for help (edit: about the project, I mean), or help can be volunteered etc. Maybe this thread can be continued for that for the time being?

There was an assumption that members here knew about all of this from a GitHub PR raised a couple of weeks back.

Well I think the majority of members here do not even use GitHub let alone participate in it. Yes there was PR raised in relation to the forum going down. For anyone interested in reading it it’s here https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/pull/1569

Without starting post-mortems into how TVH got to where it is today clearly any long time members must have seen this coming down the track and for whatever reason didn’t act on it. That includes any members that had privileged access to both the forum and the TVH GitHub.

Well discussions were held behind the scenes and it was decided by those involved to go the route outlined in post #2.

I will say those intentions are certainly noble and aspirational but my disappointment lies with the fact that the statement of intent on the future of TVH was made on the LibreELEC forum and not here where it should have been made for all to see.

I’ve always believed that you start as you mean to continue and that action alone doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence.

When the forum came back on line the content of the first post should have been in line with that of the Christian Hewitt post we see above.

Maybe one of the long standing members like Flole Systems who appeared up until now was the only member with privileged permission of some description for the forum and who does all the commits on the GitHub could join the discussion just to confirm what has been outlined above and possibly supply is with a new roadmap going forward.

The plan is to eventually retire this redmine instance and switch this forum into read-only mode. A forum with a more modern UI and (most importantly) better anti spam measures will replace it. It runs on a dedicated server, so it's not tied to any other project.

Issues will be managed through GitHub in the future.

There is now an opencollective account to collect donations for project related things (hosting, domain, maybe one day even test hardware purchases).

There have been lots of changes to reduce the "single person responsibilities", so with the new changes it should be possible to continue operation and development even if one of the administrative members disappears.

Additionally the way releases are done will be changed to rolling releases. No more backports.

I don't think that post was made as a "statement of intent", it seems more like a "things will get better soon". After all this isn't super-secret stuff, and a proper announcement will be posted here first once everything is ready (which will take more time).

@Jonas: If you want to join the team that gets the new forum running you're more than welcome to do so!

Lack of update post is a group failing, though in our group defence: at the point where the forum came up again it was not clear how or who was behind it, and while some things have clearly needed to be done there were no firm plans (or a group to agree on them) and thus few facts to communicate. Since then we started to organise, build to-do lists, and I've made progress on some of the obvious infrastructure tasks. However it seemed sensible to have a few more things in a reportable state before posting, and ideally we'd post to the 'news' section of the website for maximum visibility 'but' that needs admin rights and Andreas disappeared again before granting them, so we've been busy while waiting for him to reappear and .. time has elapsed. We appologise.

https://opencollective/tvheadend is live since yesterday evening so we can raise/spend donations in a transparent way. We even have our first donation

https://new.tvheadend.org is the current forum/website replacement sandbox. The focus is on functional things not content, so any posts or info pages seen there are WIP or just for test (don't assume anything). Proper FAQ and Getting Started type content is one area where wiki/mod people need to help out and own tasks. The project also needs to rationalise the number of places it provides info from because there are too many places and odd bits of info and this results in confusion (where to look?) and a lack of documentation maintenance (where to do it?). Documenation is a persistent challenge in most projects because it's almost always more fun to do stuff than write about it.

@DaveH please send me an email (chewitt@tvheadend domain)

Please don’t take this up the wrong way but this is an open source project with input from volunteers not some commercial entity preparing submissions for a possible buyout by some multinational corporation. You might want to cool the jets a little.

Clearly for whatever reason the majority of the original founders of the TVH project do not want to be contacted for whatever reason. It still hasn’t been established if in fact there are any possible licensing/permissions issue to be considered and if this has already been addressed I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Once again you are referring to “we” yet us, the membership are not in fact aware of who makes up the “we” collective.

I have seen so many projects with great intentions go by the wayside. As they do say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In fact one that appears to be close to your heart LibreELEC has been through at least three iterations mainly due to internal squabbling if I’m to believe this
https://www.reddit.com/r/libreELEC/comments/e6qfne/what_is_the_difference_between_coreelec_and/?rdt=42331

I certainly wouldn’t like to see this happen to the TVH project.

Transparency is the key to any successful project and it’s vital that any changes to way the TVH project is managed needs to be transmitted clearly to the stakeholders ie the membership/user base. There may be back channels already opened and discussion appears to be at an advanced stage but remember you provide the membership with a solution they want and not what you feel they should get.

There is now a working matterbridge integration between the #hts IRC channel on Libera.Chat and team-chat on Discord

Translations are now here: https://app.transifex.com/tvheadend - the change is: the URL no longer references a foundation entity that never existed. This breaks references in the codebase, but translations haven't been updated in either direction since ~2016 anyway so we can resolve that [sic] when reassociating things. There are more references to the foundation to find and correct. If people spot them, please change them (if you have rights or ability to) or flag them so we can document and work through a to-do list.

The tvheadend.org domain registration has now been transfered to Cloudflare. The domain is still nominally held in Andreas' name but there are now multiple people (including Andreas) with the ability to access and manage it moving forwards. As part of the transfer the domain was renewed for 12-months.

We now have full admin access to this server and can start exploring our options to export or dump users and other content for import to a new forum. Users should be simple to move over. Everything else is probably a large and complicated effort as Redmine is not blessed with rich export options. TBC.

NB: This site is also accessible on https://old.tvheadend.org now in preparation for being put into a read-only state at some future point.

Could you now indicate to the membership here exactly who you are referring to when you reference “we”.

Obviously we the members would not like to see a repeat of what happened when the previous “we” for some reason were no longer participating in the project, were the only people with administrative access to the forum and later became uncontactable.

A simple name and probably an email address is possibly the best method of contact in the event of any new forum going down. I do recommend giving administrative rights to members who are actually active on the forum too. Clearly that makes sense.

While not overly necessary a clear link to the TVH GitHub would help for those who do use TVH but neither self build nor contribute to the TVH code or development.

I can't speak for what happened in the past, but it's obvious to me (perhaps more so due to being a relative outsider) that there's not been direct communication between the leaders of the project and anyone else trying to meaningfully contribute. That's already been corrected and "we" are 6-8 people plus some lurkers with history. It's up to the individuals to out themselves if they choose to, but all the names will be familiar to forum and GitHub watchers. Again, I'm not intending to lead the project. It just needs some (re)organisation and the right tools to function independently, and a healthy level of anarchy encouraged to ensure it moves in a forwards direction.

Just catching up on this as a long-time TV Headend user who helped out a bit at times (and supported Adam Sutton a bit when he was developing)

Glad that someone is sorting some of this stuff out - as the project has sometimes felt a bit abandonware at times. Happy to assist as much as time permits.

Changes were made yesterday evening to align owner/admin access and permissions to several project services with the active team. Recent changes already added current team members so this was mostly cleanup to remove access from those contributors who haven't been active in a long time. Notifications were sent to anyone impacted by the changes.