Aminet replacement

[Matt_H]

Why not email the Aminet team to see what's going on?

[cgutjahr]

(I'm one of the Aminet admins)

@Minuous:

they don't give a damn about the community. More than 3 weeks downtime of a site without explanation is, I'm sure you will agree, completely unacceptable in this day and age.

Wow, thanks a lot for that one. Crap like that makes my day, really - or maybe not.

I don't remember recieving a mail from you, Mr. Jacobs (while you did contact us about various other issues in the past, so you're indeed familiar with the e-mail medium, apparently). Next time, just drop us a mail first and use the reply to decide if it's time to insult us in public. Check your dictionary for "politeness" if you're not familiar with the concept.

Aminet is currently running in degraded mode, due to ongoing problems with our main server. Additionally, we've been suffering from flakey DNS servers, that's why some of the URLs (www.aminet.net vs. aminet.net) didn't always work. We've been down for two days (one at the beginning of January, one at the end), but certainly not "for weeks" or anything like that.

Add to that that the guy responsible for the DNS servers was on holidays, the guy hosting the server was on holidays, the server admin is extremely busy with real life things and my PPC Amiga just died (more or less) which left me without a machine capable of browsing the net and your whole "they're giving a damn" theory goes down the drain.

If you hate the fact that Aminet is somewhat out of shape right now, what do you think how we feel about it?

@ChaosLoard:

Aminet search function has been broken for months, not weeks

Aminet's search function had a bug which resulted in listing to many results. Said bug was introduced right before xmas, just a few days before the main server started to act up. It's somewhat hard to fix bugs if your remote shell dies faster than you can say "we're going to get flamed for this".

@all:

As you can see, I'm back online. I'll add a news item to the wiki right now, sorry about the inconvenience.

If anybody has problems with Aminet, please just drop us a mail or join #aminet at irc.amigaworld.net. I know one or two people are still waiting for replies, I'm going to take care of this as soon as I get access to my YAM mail folders.

[NoFastMem]

@Minuous

TBH, I think your attitude is contrary to the spirit of Aminet in so many ways, I don't rate your chances of "replacing" it.

[nicomen]

Feel free to make a replacement if you are that disatisified with Aminet. It hasn't stopped others before, and probably won't in the future too.

As for the problems the main server has had, I think Christoph described it ok.

For Aminet mirrors that work just fine:

 - http://wiki.aminet.net/Mirrors

Currently 9 out of 10 mirrors up, and one more is coming soon.

Ok, the upload is somewhat hurting right now, as I haven't been able to move that to the "degraded" mode, but will try to fix that.

The search function of the degraded mode should work exactly like it did on the classic Aminet.

For news about aminet:

 - http://wiki.aminet.net/News

For suggestions, (more) complaints and chit-chatting:

  mail@aminet.net

or

  irc://irc.aminet.net/aminet (AmigaworldNET #aminet)

As for personal websites that haven't been updated, I really wonder what that is all about. I run some other websites, both personal and general, and they all seem pretty alive and kicking to me: http://utilitybase.com http://polarboing.com http://amifund.net http://amigann.com http://aros-exec.org http://my.opera.com/nicolasm also working on a school project here: http://veggidi.opentheweb.org/

I'm sorry if we made your life miserable, but frankly it's hard to know about it if you don't tell it to us. (Yep, I don't have time to stay on top of all the forums on the various portals, although I do follow the dev site forums quite closely.)

On the other hand if you are just exaggerating and using the rant as an excuse to make yet another software repository, that's ok, except it shouldn't be that hard to use regular arguments

If you for some reason happen to be happy with the work we do, don't hesitate in sending a donation to support@aminet.net using PayPal.

Ta-ta...

[Tomas]

Um.. Why not instead try to help them out with these issues? Is not like they are they are doing this for a profit these days and i find it very unfair that you compare it to tucows, which is infact a profit site.

Aminet cannot be replaced in my opinion. Without aminet the community would have been gone YEARS ago. Adding yet another competitior in this small market will not do anything good and we should instead cooperate and concentrate on keeping aminet up.

[lurkist]

I'm sure the majority of the community is understanding about any hiccups which may happen from time to time, as with any major website.

I for one am extremely grateful for the massive contribution Aminet makes to the preservation of the platform.

Of course, I anyone wants to start a new project in a similar vein, that would also be great.  It has become apparent that many developers release their products to the public domain (e.g. on their own websites) but don't (or won't) upload them to Aminet, leaving gaps in the easy availability of software.  If they were to come together on another site, it's all for the good.  :-)


Cheers,

Lurkist

[AmigaMance]

@cgutjahr
 No need to say that you are sorry. After all, you are doing this for free. It's sad to hear that your PPC Amiga died man :-( What was it?

[Minuous]

90% of the time when I go to Aminet it times out.

And uploads are NOT working even when the site comes up. Obviously this is true for others since there have not been new uploads for weeks. Again, everybody, I'm talking about UPLOADS not DOWNLOADS here!! (After all one can still download Fred Fish disks but uploads to that series are no longer possible, the same seems to apply to Aminet.) Not a day or two here and there as was claimed. And I indeed have written emails which have had no response.

Fine, I won't bother making a new site, obviously there is no support for it.

[Hyperspeed]

I'm trying http://de.aminet.net/aminet/ but it doesn't work. I started to like that one as I could see the daily uploads in a nice list - it made it look more current than the old grey page I used to frequent.

How much does it cost to keep Aminet going in terms of repairs, upgrades, hosting or just plain man hours? Maybe a PayPal link like on Amiga.org would encourage a more tangible form of support!

:-D

[skurk]

Minuous wrote:
> Fine, I won't bother making a new site, obviously there is no support for it.

Now, what's up with people's attitude these days?  Look, nobody's stopping you from making your own Amiga related site, if you're lucky it might even grow to become quite popular.  What we're saying (or at least what I'm saying) is that we probably won't ditch Aminet for it.

Wish I could do something to help Aminet, though.  Besides money donations, that is - I've spent more than enough on selfish things like hardware lately. :-D

[InTheSand]

cgutjahr wrote:
Crap like that makes my day, really - or maybe not.

I'd like to say keep up the good work with Aminet! I use it several times a week, most weeks, and would be extremely sad to see anything happen to it. I'm really appreciative of your and others' time and effort in keeping this great resource available.

 - Ali

[Minuous]

>What we're saying (or at least what I'm saying) is that we probably won't ditch Aminet for it.

If you read my post carefully you would see that I'm suggesting a replacement, not a competitor. Ie. I'm thinking of the situation where Aminet availability remains very poor and where new uploads remain impossible.

Now many of you might be willing to use a half-dead site with  no updated content. But assuredly many will not. It only adds to the perception of the Amiga as a "dead" platform if there is nowhere to release new software.

If there is nowhere for new releases, coders will not bother writing new software. If the flow of new software and updates dries up, the platform will be abandoned. It's quite simple really.

I really don't think this is controversial, I'm not sure why there is such a lack of support for at least one of these 2 options: (a) getting Aminet online again; or (b) establishing a replacement for it.

Does the community really feel comfortable with going for months at a time with no new software?

[Matt_H]

Temporary server trouble does not institute a need for a new software respository, in my opinion. So new software will be a little late getting onto the internet - big deal. It's not like we're in a cutthroat daily competition against anyone.

[jahc]

Now many of you might be willing to use a half-dead site with no updated content. But assuredly many will not. It only adds to the perception of the Amiga as a "dead" platform if there is nowhere to release new software.

Aminet is experiencing hiccups, but no way is it dead. They've revamped the search engine and made it more powerful, they've added architecture fields to search for other amiga-like OS's, they've given it a facelift, they've worked hard on bringing back ADT for FTP users.... listen to the guys reasons earlier in this thread. Half the fricken people responsible for the site were on holiday over January, and his own machine was b0rked for a short while. They're committed to the project. If you want, make your own file repository, but it will only be a knee jerk reaction to a problem that doesnt even exist.

If there is nowhere for new releases, coders will not bother writing new software. If the flow of new software and updates dries up, the platform will be abandoned. It's quite simple really.

Speak for yourself buddy. I'm a coder, and theres always at least some method of distributing my software. aminet isnt the only option.

[Mucker]

Aminet is a trully great resource of information to us all, the files obviously still exist, rather than loose them, or get stored away to a dusty attic, why not affiliate them to amiga.org?

Could well be a good alternative, would make the sight larger, bring in more users, possibly!?!

To make things even more interesting, it could even be done on a 1year subscription,limited access to non members for free, amiga.org full access £2, with aminet £3.

Would help fund our fav sight and help aminet at the same time!
 :love:  Could be a match made in heaven.

[Minuous]

>Speak for yourself buddy. I'm a coder, and theres always at least some method of distributing my software. aminet isnt the only option.

So where are the alternative sites then?

>To make things even more interesting, it could even be done on a 1year subscription,limited access to non members for free, amiga.org full access £2, with aminet £3.

Selling PD? No, I don't think so. The authors of the software have not written it to be sold for profit, it is expressly against the licences of the vast majority of Aminet software and therefore what you are proposing is illegal and immoral.