this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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You should ask this to your favourite distro packagers, not to the home assistant developers.
In any case, it is such a mess of dependencies due to load of optional packages, very active development, that continuously break dependencies on the package repo.
What advantage would bring have a most of the time obsolete distro specific repo? On a maintainer POV this is the typical use case for distro agnostic deployment, maybe flatpak, maybe docker.
I disagree. The Home Assistant developers are the ones who chose to create an OS. They could have chosen to create distro packages instead, or at least software which is amenable to being packaged by distros.
What does that mean in the context of Home Assistant?
It comes down to what are the developers willing or able to support.
For smaller teams they usually don’t want the responsibility of maintaining the package for distros, and HA developers have chosen to not support that option themselves. In their case I see it - what’s the benefit or incentive to them to maintain packages and the associated support costs or headaches. Containers mean they get a known state and don’t have to try to support unknown environments.
Some interested people can maintain the packages for their chosen distro - for instance I see one for Gentoo but it’s only up to 2024.6. It’s the first that came up in a search but there are likely more too supported by the community.
In my case, I also think that using HAOS on a dedicated box has led to a more stable experience as it’s not competing for resources on my other hosts, and attaching devices to it is much simpler. I think encouraging a solid base for people means a better experience overall when to be honest it’s hard to get started with it to begin with for many people.
It seems to me they chose to provide a platform that vastly simplifies the installation of their software and maintenance of its code from a debugging standpoint. This seems perfectly reasonable. This appears to bother a particular community who feel entitled enough to demand multiple developers cater to their distribution's needs. Shit needs to stop.
Your reading of the situation is wrong.
Honestly I really don't think I am.
I've seen a number of topics over the last few weeks that are framed as this evil developer is doing a sinister thing... And for what it's worth I read the "clickbait" and then did my due diligence and followed the links / git responses etc and lo and behold every. single. issue. was stemming from that community.
We aren't reddit. This isn't 4chan. If your community is getting cut off because, frankly, it's being unreasonable... don't come here looking for a personal army.
Nobody has said that here.
I've no idea what community you're referring to. Nobody here has demanded that any developers cater to their distribution's needs.
Again, I've no idea what community you're referring to. Nobody has come here looking for a personal army.
Your characterisation of the commentary on this post seems like that of an overly. dramatic. teenager.
Strange- the very tone of this thread is suggesting that the HA developers choice in how they distribute their platform is "incorrect" by your assertions. Further you seem to disagree with explanations provided as to why those choices were likely made.
Dismissing those statements and observations do not make them incorrect. Nothing I stated is dramatic: it is an observation and a comment on an increasing trend popping up around several projects. This particular topic and your responses within it align with that trend. My closing statement was directed at that. You are welcome to not like it but resorting to insults is a bit childish.
Not incorrect, just poor engineering. Anti-social ultimately.
I can see only two disagreements in the whole post. Only one of those is about the reasons for creating an OS rather than distro packages. I have corrected a number of factual errors and errors in reasoning but those aren't disagreements.
Yes, my dismissing of them is not what makes them incorrect.
LOL "this evil developer is doing a sinister thing"
Since HA depends on a lot of python packages, on external softwares and libraries it could not feasible to ensure that the versions packaged with the distribution will always be in line with those needed by HA
I disagree.
Then go do it.
I'm not a Debian Developer and won't become one: http://settrans.net/~rah/why-not-debian.html
Also, I'm not a Home Assistant user so I've no interest in contributing.
Then do if for your distribution then. It's clearly not that difficult, you've all but explicitly stated as much.
I use Debian.
I have not said that, or anything like it.
Perhaps you missed the fact that I'm not a Home Assistant user and have no interest in contributing?
So then it isn't actually that feasible then, otherwise you'd do more than just whine about it on the Internet. Especially when there are valid reasons to not support that method.
So let me get your logic straight: you're saying that it isn't feasible because if it were feasible then a person who could do it would necessarily do it? LOL that makes no sense.
Well, yeah. Especially when you've already been given reasons why it isn't. But clearly you know better than the devs or people familiar with the product.
Why do you think that because a person could do something they necessarily will?
I don't, but in this case, we know it's not because they got rid of that option. Why? Because the task is infeasible to support. Kinda like you've been arguing against this entire time in the face of multiple reasons why people aren't doing it.
You're far from the first person to want this, and the devs no longer offer it as a supported method for a reason after all. No one is saying it is impossible, just not something that's feasible to create and support. This really should not be this hard of a concept to understand.
You're not making any sense.
Are you saying that the Home Assistant developers used to support distro packages?
OP is saying that. They said it was "infeasible".
Well, good for you. Now let's prove it
You first.
@rah @Zavorra it's easier to build a business model around an OS than it is around a package distro.