[Galene] Re: Talk about Galène today (monday) at 17pm CET

["email@matrix8.org" <email@matrix8.org>]

Hi Juliusz,
I thank you very much for your very interesting talk during the event 
which inspired me a lot.

(To mailing list members : Below is regarding the talk event and my 
sharing personal experience of deploying Galene. You may ignore this 
Email, 186 lines.)

Please allow me to describe myself quickly so you will understand from 
which knowledge level I am writing this. I consider myself as an open 
source app-finder who eagerly keeps looking for apps which make people's 
life easier and monitoring the big forests where apps grow one after 
another, ex.) Github forest, SourceForge, OSDN. I do not know 
programming. That's why I keep using what others develop as open source 
software.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is obvious that people became more in 
need of video-meeting apps than before. So I had deployed VPSs running 
BigBlueButton and Jitsi-meet to help people around me to communicate 
safely since last year. I have been monitoring EduMeet and Galene both 
on Github and the mailing list very curiously for past months also.

Please keep it in your mind that I have no intention at all to blame 
anyone nor any open source projects at all rather I am grateful to all 
developers for their contributions for the community. I will mention 
names of some apps below for comparison.

Since I do not know how to read source codes, I usually judge the 
softwares by testing them myself and also with the number of people 
involved with the projects, which usually reflects the quality of the 
software and assurance of long time maintenance. When I came to know 
Galene, it looked so interesting to me but it had only 4 contributors. 
So honestly I did not expect a lot to the project initially.

Below is the current figures on Github

	jitsi-meet  Contributors 340  + 329 contributors
	BigBlueButton Contributors 142 + 131 contributors
	edumeet Contributors 34 + 23 contributors
	Galene / Contributors 4

If Jitsi-meet and BigBlueButton are the giant trees on Gibhub forest in 
my eyes, edumeet is probably a young tree size. Then Galene in my eyes 
initially looked like a mushroom in the forest. So I really did not 
expect much on Galene after I recognized the figure of 4.

But my attending to your talk event and met with your core team and 
being provided with your presentation, I found that the Galene project 
has a big future potential. That's why I commented during your talk on 
the chat that I should not judge the project with the number of 
contributers. Even the Contributer figure is 4. After attending your 
talk, I interpret this figure of 4 as equivalent to more than 4 x 100 
development power.

During the your talk event, I was very much impressed with the 
performance of Galene comparing with BigBlueButton and Jitsi-meet in 
terms of stability and quality of video and audio. So I immediately 
thought of running it on own VPS.

I was very lucky to receive very encouraging chat messages during your 
talk event from other participants for me to deploy own Galene instances. 
They mentioned that it takes only 15 min including the installation of 
TLS cert. Another mentioned that I would never be able to go back once I 
run Galene since Galene is a static binary + json config. I could not 
understand how great the combination of the static binary and json 
config due to lack of my knowledge at that time. All I understood was it 
takes for 15 min for the seasoned developers and I would not be able to 
go back after experiencing to run the Galene. Their words fueled my 
passion to deploy Galene. Thank you to all the participants for the 
positive energy exchange.

So after your talk event was over, I immediately started to do some 
research and plan to deploy Galene. For me it is very important to 
understand the whole picture of the deployment procedure of Galene 
before working on VPS rather than simply following the given 
instructions.

The first thing I researched on was to see if my usual preferred Debian 
is OK to run Galene. I found out that no particular Linux distro was 
recommended on official Galene site.
Then I started to research on preferred version of Go.  I found out that 
no particular version requirement was mentioned on official Galene site. 
So I just installed Debian 10's official package of Go assuming it meets 
the requirements.
It was my first time to touch Go so I wanted to do some research on the 
background of Go language especially to see if there is any privacy 
breaching string attached to Google, the mother of Go. I read that 
modules are downloaded from Google servers with default settings. I 
could not verify if using Go breaches privacy or not yet. Then I 
proceeded to read on Pion... I had spent already 2 hours up to this 
stage. I had been walking with the turtle speed while beating around the 
bush.
:-)

To make the very long story short, I want to share with you that  it 
took me total 4 days to be able to deploy Galene in stead of 15 min of 
seasoned developers required time. It actually took  4 days x intensive 
12 hours = minimum 48 hours instead of the 15 min. Although it took long 
for me, I had been having fun and totally engrossed with understanding 
as much as background knowledge needed to understand how Galene works.

I felt as if I climbed to the top of the mount Everest after successful 
deployment of Galene. It was a long way to go for me. The experience was  
as if seasoned climbers gave me the location of the Everest and provided 
a very rough, minimum, and limited but very important  instructions on 
how to climb to the top while describing how beautiful the command of 
the view they saw from the summit.  The rough instruction didn't include 
any detailed information at all on what I should be equipped with, 
condition of the path, the weather condition, potential risks on the 
path, why I have to take particular actions, etc. Because of so much 
troubles and accidents I experienced during the climb, I can say I 
learned a lot.

 Today I have been enjoying learning how to write JSON dictionary 
correctly since every time when I replace correctly working default 
groupname.json with my new settings, I keep encountering Galene's 
"Internal server error" messages. But all errors are caused by my own 
lack of knowledge and training on json. I know I will understand json 
correct in a few hours of readings and experiencing some trial and error. 
A person like me could deploy Galene. For other skilled people it must 
be very much easier to deploy Galene.

After the deployment of Galene, I think that I understand better why 
Galene is great. The static binary is very stable, fast and portable, 
correct? And it can be easily configured with simple JSON files. The UI 
is also static and the files can be modified very easily by editing HTML 
and CSS files. It is simple and powerful, I think. Judging from htop 
result, it looks it consumes minimum CPU power and RAM space. Turning on, 
off of microphone and video cams anytime during the meeting is very 
smooth, quick, easy and stable. Being able to share multiple screens and 
apps, it is so easy to do more effective presentations easily. It is a 
WoW experience. It is no wonder that I was told that I won't be able to 
go back to other apps after deploying own Galene. Please correct me if 
my understanding is wrong.

In terms of installation procedure, both BigBlueButton and Jitsi-meet is 
well documented enough and super easy to install with basic knowledge of 
Linux commands by following the official documents. It's easy to the 
point that I learned not much new during the deployment procedure.

But with regards to Galene, probably the documentation could be adjusted 
for less seasoned administrators who wants to deploy Galene. For example, 
just sharing tested environment information of Linux distribution and 
versions of Go will immediately save the time of people who would want 
to run Galene, I think. With regards to required Go version, I found out 
version minimum 1.13 is required only after I hit my head with error 
messages since I was using Debian stable package of 1.11.6
I found the info here. Github "Issue #22" Building on Debian stable (10.
7) fails to find crypto/ed25519
So the Galene official site could add the info on required Go version, 
minimum 1.13. This will immediately help others I assume.

I am willing to assist the team with my limited knowledge on project 
documentation if you think I could be of your small help. If Galene 
developers are targeting only seasoned administrators as audiences, the 
current doc may be good enough already for them to be able to deploy 
Galene in 15 min.

I also want to share that I had to replace the original self-signed 
certificate by installing certbot because my friends whom I invited to 
join me to test freshly deployed Galene instance refused to join the 
session when they visited the link I gave because their browser 
intercepted them to visit my Galene site with "Potential risk" error 
message. I told them it is safe to further proceed by accepting the risk 
on the browser but they trusted the browser's error message over my 
persuasion. They even invited me for ZOOM meeting instead. It was 
coincident and timely that Juliusz mentioned in the mailing list on " cp 
key.pem ~galene/data/key.pem,  cp fullchain.pem ~galene/data/cert.pem" 
that was very the moment I needed to understand what to copy and where 
to copy after installed certificates with certbot.

Now the Galene 0.3.1 is out, I will work on the upgrade soon. I will try 
to complete this in one hour while seeking to complete it in 15 min. It 
won't take 4 days this time.

I am sorry if I occupied too much time of people on mailing list with my 
this Email. I simply wanted to share my experience and gratitude with 
the community. Please forgive me if I ever there is anyone feeling not 
good by receiving this Email.

Thank you very much for sharing Galene with the world!
May you, all contributors and all people around the community be well, 
happy and peaceful.
:-)

John

--------- Original Message ----------
Subject:  [Galene]  Talk about Galène today (monday) at 17pm CET
From:     Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>
To:       galene@lists.galene.org
Cc:       
Date:     Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:32:39 +0100

I'll be giving a talk about Galène this afternoon:

  https://ffwd.flashgrants.org/calendar.html#event-15/

(Yeah, I know, it says Dave, but I'm the one giving the talk.)

Sorry for the short delay.

-- Juliusz