FOG worries
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In no way is this meant as anything but constructive. It seems like most of this would have been discussed at some point, but I’m not finding it in the forum.
Like many others, we’ve come to depend on FOG. We’ve been starting to feel a fair bit of pain when it comes to imaging (U)EFI machines and have been hoping 0.33 would help with that. We’ve been waiting a long time, but I’m beginning to think we should stop waiting and should start helping out.
I’d like to better understand the issues that have delayed 0.33. I’m betting that a couple of key people moving into new jobs may have been a primary factor but maybe there was a major change in direction that ended up causing more pain than was expected. (I’ve been on the wrong end of that a few times myself.)
I’m also curious about the donations. Are they significant or so small as to just be a pain to manage?
We’re lucky enough to have two programmers on staff and will be adding a third in about four months. FOG is important enough to us that we want to begin donating some time. Any advice on how to get involved on that end would be appreciated. We were going to just download .33 and begin banging away in a test environment.
Basically, I’d like to see a discussion of how the community can help out, really help out.
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0.33 has hit some snags in development, but is mostly functional. I think there are a few pages where the code hasn’t been updated (new list functions that are working on some pages aren’t being called by other pages yet, or something like that). The big issue is that single partition images are not working if the system wasn’t sysprepped before uploading, but if you use sysprep then it’s not a problem.
Due to the new structure of 0.33, and the fact that it was almost completely written by a single developer who is unable to commit time to FOG these days, there hasn’t been any new code submitted in a while.
As far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been much in the way of donations, and what little there has been doesn’t go very far. I think they almost cover the cost of hosting fogproject.org, but I don’t have access to the account so I’m no authority on that.
More developers would be an excellent way to donate! Right now the code is the documentation, so as for a starting point I can’t really help you there. Pull down from SVN and mess around with it until you find something broken is the best advice I have.
Some of us are working to get things into a more organized state so that we can make it easier for the community to become involved, but with the holidays upon us its most likely not going to happen until January.
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That bit about little submitted code is really worrying. From surfing the forums I got the impression that Chuck and Jian were still quite active but I guess getting down to coding, or at least submitting code, hasn’t been happening much.
I’m also really surprised that the donations are so minimal. Then again, we haven’t donated anything. But still, with the value that FOG brings, I assumed that the donations would be flying in. Hmmm… Maybe some crowd-funding is needed.
Thanks for some transparency on this Bryce. We’ll be in touch.