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2018-05-01

Serious Issues

Dear Void Users,

We have a problem. In the last few months people have been complaining about the lack of management capabilities in the Void Core Team. We have been aware of the problem, and it’s time to explain the situation.

The current project leader has disappeared. We have had no contact with him since the end of January, and no meaningful contact for well over a year. This itself would be concerning, on its own but no threat to the project.

The problem is that we currently have no ability to manage some of Void’s central resources. In the past, they were managed exclusively by the former project leader. Namely:

  • The Void Linux Github Organisation.
  • The IRC Channels.
  • The domains.

What have we been doing?

Github

We contacted Github, but they declined any help to regain access to the organisation. This is really really unfortunately as Github grew to a tool for both source and community management. This has led to questions of if Github is still the best option for us, but we are continuing with the platform for the foreseeable future.

Freenode IRC

We have contacted freenode support. We see hope to regain access to the VoidLinux IRC Channels. IRC is an essential tool for communication of the core team.

Domains

We regained partial control over voidlinux.com. But the most used domain, voidlinux.eu, is currently not under our control. It currently works, but as soon as we have to move any IP addresses, it will fail. IP addresses may need to be moved for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being when we upgrade the master build server.

What’s going to happen?

Currently we are in limbo and are trying to get back on track. We see no possibility to regain access to the Github organisation. So for Github, we will move to a new organisation.

We have a similar solution for the domains. We will move to a different domain and continue to support the voidlinux.eu domain as long as possible.

For the IRC Channels, we will try to get in contact with freenode and regain access. We are hoping that freenode support will be open to our request.

How will we mitigate these issues?

We learned our lesson. In future no single person will have exclusive access to Void’s resources.

Furthermore, we’re in contact with a non profit organisation that helps open source projects to manage donations and other resources. We hope that we can announce further details in a few weeks.

For now, just be aware that the engineering work to help mitigate our problems is underway. This engineering work is consuming the full resources of 2 senior contributors, and has unfortunately also led to longer PR review times..

If you have any questions, you can contact us via the forum, Twitter, or IRC.