Sublime Forum

Package Control Outage

#10

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the Sublime HQ twitter account, but I have posted on my personal account, the Package Control twitter, the Package Control GitHub repo, Discord, the forum and reddit.

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#11

You did everything you could then. Thanks for your efforts!

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#12

New Child !

I think that’s great news. Congratulates! I’m very happy to hear that it was not my admin skills that could not get a successful install of ST3+PC on Fedora 29.

Please don’t beat yourself up over this minor set back. You are doing the best you can and we all appreciate your efforts on this project.

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#13

I don’t know if money is an issue but the way you talk about servers from 2012I can’t help thinking that.

Sooooooooo. I want to suggest you start doing a subscription payment model or maybe a machine limit. Personally I’ve used my Sublime license on about 7 different companies machines as well as 4 of my personal machines. I’ve always felt guilty about the sheer amount of use I’ve had out of them.

Maybe you could get inspiration from an obscure search engine scraping app that has a VERY strong per-machine license system. Its called Scrapebox. Easy to find.

Maybe you could start limiting it a bit and/or releasing business licenses.

I don’t know - I’m throwing ideas out there because I feel I’ve had more service out of my license than seems fair and I think you deserve more money for the app.

Maybe even just make the trial a bit tougher/annoying to compel people tto buy?

I dunno - just a thought.

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#14

@LokisHat Just to clarify, I built Package Control and have run the server with the default channel since 2011 as a hobby. This is not an official Sublime HQ project. In 2016 I joined the Sublime HQ team, but Package Control remains a separate project maintained in my free time.

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#15

Thank you wbond. we hope that soon we will be able to use package control again.

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#16

I’m wondering what fraction of Sublime Text users refrain from using Package Control, and why there might be reasons for that (except for outages like this one, they are quite rare). I’m just surprised to learn it is an unofficial project by Sublime HQ team member :slight_smile: Still, it’s very good and helpful, thanks.

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#17

I am amazed to find this out. Like LokitsHat I feel I’ve had fantastic value for my sublime licence, and my sublime merge licence too. I’d like to send you a contribution for PackageControl. Sublime Text is fantastic, but what is it without PackageControl? Please tell me how I can donate.

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#18

https://packagecontrol.io/say_thanks

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#19

Cheers mate.

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#20

Hello! The package control is functional

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#21

??? :sweat::

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#22

Is PC a passion project or does $ really help? If $ helps, I can donate to keep PC running, no problem.

Is there a roadmap to HQ adoption? Should users of Sublime be focusing on manual package management? Over the years, my Sublime environement depends on PC. I sync to a User DIR in Dropbox and all my systems are in sync with the packages I have installed, etc…What are the contingencies when both the internal Sublime install path fails and the website portal to the packages fail as well? If PC is not a HQ first-class citizen, then I recommend decoupling PC so users can access the packages via another channel. If there is another channel, that would be good to elevate. Thanks for all the hard work on Sublime and have been a loyal user for many years and inspiring others to adoption.

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#23

Package Control in 2018 cost around $1,000 to run the server. Opting into Linode’s backup plan will raise the cost to probably around $1,230 for 2019. I will likely start going over the 8TB limit for bandwidth in the next month or so, so a realistic projection of costs for 2019 will be $1,300.

Currently there is no plan to transfer the project to Sublime HQ. If I get to the point where I can realistically no longer maintain the server, there would be discussion about community involvement vs Sublime HQ. Ultimately that would probably require some changes due to privacy concerns. Currently I am the only individual who has access to the server and the information.

All that to say, I currently basically maintain the server and do some light work on the code base. @FichteFoll and @ThomSmith do a ton of day-to-day work on the primary channel, reviewing packages and giving users feedback.

All parts of Package Control, the website and default channel are open source, but that doesn’t really affect the operational costs of keeping the default channel server running.

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#24

Thanks so much for the reply. Like to make some time building a mirror site/resource. That effort would be a type of donation I could get behind now that I see there is a need.

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#25

Is this situation resolved now? I’m still having trouble with package control, so am wondering if it is related to this or a separate issue? Thanks for all of your work getting it sorted :slight_smile:

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#26

No, the site is not back yet. I’m most of way through recovering data from the database. Hopefully it will be functional later today.

I’m open to discussing people’s ideas, but this could end up being a rather involved change to the hosting configuration. Moving to multiple servers and replication is going to take time and testing, and we’d need double the server resources. We could opt for a simpler mirror of the channel data, but then that leaves the service still degraded (usage submission and website would be offline) and still requiring disaster recovery involving database recovery/restoration.

My plan for now is to throw a little more money at the situation rather than time. If I add block storage to the VM, I can return to doing full daily dumps and compressing those and sending them to my NAS. I can also pay to enable Linode’s backups that will give me a couple of snapshots of the server at preset intervals.

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#27

what`s now?

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#28

[quote=“LokisHat, post:13, topic:41274”]
I don’t know - I’m throwing ideas out there because I feel I’ve had more service out of my license than seems fair and I think you deserve more money for the app.[/quote]

See the Sustainable business model? thread, for users firmly in agreement with you. My post in that thread points out that if ST rises in cost with USD inflation (since we pay in USD) “it will take until 2023 before a Sublime Text license hits $100 - which I would still consider a bargain at twice the price.

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#29

The problem this outage demonstrates is the dependency on the package server for almost everyone using Sublime with extensions. It suggests that instructions for installing packages from the file system level and/or instructions for producing private repository listings is going to be essential for having a robust systems that does not have such a single point of failure. The reliability of the package server up to this point has produced a false sense of security. I would certainly be happy to support making the existing system more robust in any case.

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