Looking for new maintainer for Fedora / EPEL ownCloud packages

Source

So I've been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can't take this crap any more.

I only personally really needed OC for calendar and contact sync anyway, so I've set up Radicale instead: it's written in Python and it doesn't have a ridiculous forest of bundled crap.

Given that there are dozens of other things I could be spending my time on that I'd find more rewarding, I'm just not willing to do any further major updates of the Fedora / EPEL ownCloud package, I'm sorry. I'm willing to keep the current major versions (8.x in everything but EPEL 6, 7.x in EPEL 6) updated until they go EOL, at which point if no-one else is interested, I will orphan the package.

If anyone would like to take on the work of doing the 8.1 upgrade and maintaining the package in future, please do let me know and I'll happily transfer it over. To do a decent job, though, you are going to need to know or be willing to learn quite a lot of intimate and incredibly annoying details about things like PHP class loading and how Composer works. If you don't, for instance, know what it means for unbundling purposes when a PHP library specifies 'classmap' as the autoload mechanism in its composer.json file, and you're not willing to spend your time learning, you probably don't want to own this package. :)

I'm very sorry to folks who are using it, but I really can't deal with the crap any more. If all you need is calendar/contact sync, there are easier ways. Check out Radicale or something like it.

Upstream does of course provide ownCloud packages in an OBS repo. They do not follow Fedora web app packaging policies or unbundling rules, and probably don't work very well with SELinux. Switching from the Fedora/EPEL packages to the OBS ones is likely to require moving various things around and config file editing and stuff. I'm not going to document that, sorry. If anyone else does, though, that'd be great.

Comments

Jean-Louis wrote on 2015-10-04 18:01:
Sorry to hear that - thanks for all your work! I've always been very happy with how smooth and easy OC installation & upgrades went with the official Fedora packages. Little did I know this was only possible because of you enduring all the pain for us...
brent wyatt wrote on 2015-10-30 01:37:
thanks for maintaining owncloud for us Adam. I have been following you since the Mandrake Club days and would not have moved to Fedora without your great support. I use Owncloud on centos and the install was a breeze. I did not know it was you who put in the blood sweat and tears to make it work for us, but the work is appreciated.