Messages

1

18.7 Legacy Series / Re: Miising alias description

« on: June 03, 2019, 05:39:18 pm »

I admire your principles. I'll mimic whatever level of conversation you want to have. We can indeed get back to a useful discussion.

Thank you, Franco. 

Unfortunately, my use case (aliases as abuse blacklists) requires the feature -- it's as basic to me as the ability to comment source code.  I wish I could make do without it, because the OPNsense GUI for GeoIP aliases is elegant, well thought out, and powerful and would make my life much easier.  But I can't maintain other aliases that are dozens, or even hundreds, of lines long without an ability to identify the ISP, country, abuse type, permanence, etc. on each entry.

Apparently, the loss of the feature is not a deal killer for others.  Best of luck to you going forward and thank you for the time you've taken on this aspect of opnSense.

Regards,
  fmaxwell

2

18.7 Legacy Series / Re: Miising alias description

« on: June 03, 2019, 04:50:16 pm »

You are absolutely right, albeit dismissing the fact that this is a reaction to an unreasonable stance after having taken the time to explain this multiple times. If people don't like other people's decisions and their reasoning there's no reason to start acting a certain less productive way. That's what happened here.

You explained your reasoning and we explained ours.  We failed to convince you of the value of the feature and you failed to convince us that the non-negotiable, never-to-be-revisited decision to remove it was the right one.  I don't think that entitles either of us to lash out at the other.

There's no use for a straw man argument...

It's not a straw man.  You suggested contributing to development if we wanted that feature, yet you have categorically ruled out ever putting it back in.  You didn't make it contingent on the code being clean, well-documented, efficient, maintainable, etc.  You just said it was a "final," "non-negotiable" change.

BTW, I released my first open source software in 1985.

Note this is a community forum. Try https://www.deciso.com/request-support/

This community forum is where AdSchellevis of Deciso suggested that someone could "sponsor" the reintroduction of the feature.  So I'm asking him in the same forum because I'd like the answer to be visible to others reading this exchange.  Perhaps we could pool our money to pay for it.

3

18.7 Legacy Series / Re: Miising alias description

« on: June 03, 2019, 03:28:31 pm »

Attacking people for their behaviour that you happen to not agree with is not a good case for future discussion. It would rather indicate you see what you want to see and merely try to use common sense now to get what you want without binding yourself to the same understanding of civility.

Franco, you seem to be the one attacking people and showing a lack of civility, accusing RGijsen of "barking" and being "pissed you[RGijsen] don't get what you want for no effort given."  You even went so far as to condescendingly suggesting that he needs you to explain the term "non-negotiable."  By contrast, RGijsen has been courteous and professional, writing:

I wish you the very best of luck with it. No hard feelings, but I'm pretty sure this way it'll cost you paying customers. It cost you at least one already.

As to 'putting in some effort,' to what end?  All of us who want alias element descriptions should spend weeks reimplementing them so that you can reject our work?

From time to time there are companies needing changes to the (core) system and contribute (financially) making things happen in case they can't drive the change themselves (or just need more guidance).

This appears to be the first time Deciso has suggested that someone could "sponsor" the reintroduction of the feature.  How much money would Deciso require in order to reintroduce alias element descriptions into the GUI, making it a standard, supported feature going forward? 

4

18.7 Legacy Series / Re: Miising alias description

« on: May 15, 2019, 06:46:51 pm »

The time is better spent elsewhere.

Thank you for sharing your opinion and for your prompt reply.

5

18.7 Legacy Series / Re: Missing alias description

« on: May 15, 2019, 05:05:55 pm »

Over the years we have had to make a choice: listen to the users that we have or listen to potential users who only miss this one feature X. We choose to listen to the former group as that is the one we can depend on. And we also like to build solutions for them, not only take things away.

I was an OPNsense user and I never saw a poll asking if I would be okay with losing countless alias item descriptions I had entered.  Had I seen such a poll here, I would have registered at the time to voice my objections.

I had blacklist aliases I developed to protect our servers, with descriptions that included type(s) of abuse, whether the entry was to be permanent or temporary, and what ISP/organization owned the IP block.  Without those descriptions, it became all-but-impossible to maintain those aliases.  That's why I went through the extremely time-consuming process of migrating back to pfSense.

Imagine if you updated to a later revision of your IDE (integrated development environment) and all of the comments were stripped out of your source code.  That's what it was like.  My well-documented aliases turned into the firewall equivalent of source code with all of the comments and line breaks stripped out.

plain and simple, if it's an entity worth describing, treat it like that. create an alias, and bundle sets of aliases for the firewall rule you want to create.

That's as silly as saying that if a line of C is worth describing with a comment, then it should be worth putting into its own standalone file that you can #include into the parent source file.

I hope that the OPNsense developers reconsider the decision to remove the alias item description from the web GUI.  Its removal might not bother a hobbyist using OPNsense to implement a simple home firewall, but it's a serious blow to many of us trying to maintain OPNsense firewalls on networks with multiple servers, multiple WANs, and large aliases used to block malicious traffic.