Community Apps >>> Cloudron Catalog Apps

[creative567145]

Hi everybody

It's logical that the following scenario would occur:

1. As more Community apps are added
2. Those that have been marked as very stable
3. Can be processed by the Cloudron team and added in the official Cloudron Catalog

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In that scenario, the people that have been using a Community App
(examples: Hermes, Fizzy, Garage S3, Ente, Browserless),
would have 2 choices:

1. Stay on the Community version (if the maintainer decides to keep maintaining it)

2. Switch to get the new updates from the Cloudron source

• This post is about that.
• It would be awesome if the Cloudron team could (some day) release an update which includes the option to switch from the Community source, to the Cloudron source.
• This way, a migration is not needed and the transition goes smooth.

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This way, the Cloudron Catalog can grow much faster while with max stability.

Hope that was useful

[girish]

@creative567145 good you bring it up. At least in my mind, the Cloudron catalog is not the "next step" in a community package's lifecycle. In some cases it might actively hamper the community package author. For example, if we were to take over @luckow 's packages from his recently announced package store, I am not sure how he feels (given he has invested much time and resources into this).

Maybe it makes sense for Cloudron team to take over when the package is popular and well in use but the community packager does not want to maintain anymore. This probably requires collection of some stats on package installs which we don't collect (but probably the packager can collect on their server to get a guesstimate).

Not sure how others perceive all this though, happy to collect some input here.

[ruihildt]

@girish As a cloudron customer, I will always trust more cloudron to do a good job maintaining a package, so if it makes sense to take over an existing package which is community maintained (due to general demand for example), then Cloudron should do it.

[creative567145]

Thanks @girish
Us, the people that install softwares through Cloudron (Cloudron catalog + Community apps) worry only about 2 things:

• That each app is updated regularly
• Stability & Performance

Who packages and maintains it, doesn't matter much.
If a community maintainer does a good job, great. We would gladly donate to support his/her work.

3 scenarios exist:

1. If the Cloudron team planned on adding couple Apps in the Catalog (which a community maintainer was faster to release on the Community list), and now the App isn't added on the list because somebody was faster.
   Yes, some maintainers do a great job. But not all are up to the gold standard that the Cloudron team has. Most of those people have regular jobs, so they can't dedicate the additional time.

2. If a Community maintainer, stops maintaining an App. And if the Cloudron team picks to add the same App on the Catalog.
   All those hundreds/thousands of people that initially used the Community version, would need an streamlined switch to the Cloudron version. Ideally without a full migration.
   This is where it would be very useful if some day in the future the Cloudron team could create an option in the Community App dashboard, to just click to change the .json URL - so that the App continues to get the next updates from the Cloudron source.

3. A Community maintainer want's to help the community and the Cloudron team by first maintaining an App himself, but with the purpose in the future to delegate the same App to the Cloudron team, so that he can redirect his focus on preparing new Apps.