[Swan-dev] LibreSwan Marketing

[Paul Wouters]

On Fri, 27 Dec 2013, David Clayton wrote:

> I know that IPSEC isn’t quite as ‘sexy’ as the work being done over at LibreOffice, but I would like to suggest some minor improvements that I feel would
> make a big difference:
> 
> Creation of a ‘marketing’ or ‘general’ section of the website –  somewhere to see a list of Linux distributions currently using LS (and therefore those
> not), I’m new to the game, so not quite sure how established communication works between the distributions, but on Saturday Mike Gilbert (Gentoo) posted
> about integration with their distribution, and it (appeared to me) that he may have accidently stumbled upon the existence of LS, relying on the
> distribution maintainers being ‘in the know’ and aware of new packages, rather than directly contacted with an e-mail saying ‘hey, don’t you know we are
> the new name in IPSEC’. Please forgive my ignorance if there is already something in place, or all the distribution maintainers have already been
> personally contacted.

I've done some work offline for the wiki and will continue to do so in
the next few days. I'll add a section for this.

> The next on my list would be a roadmap – this might be a difficult subject as I seem to remember the OpenSwan roadmap / wish list / bug tracker seemed to
> get rolled into one page that (again my personal opinion) never got updated, or gave a true reflection on the status of the project.

Yeah, it never got updated. Which is why I like the roadmap based on
bugzilla better, but also the old openswan mantis roadmap based on bug
and feature items did not reflect at all what it should. So perhaps a
manual road map page would be a good start.

> A wish or feature list separate from a bug report, on which I would request things like, improved logging / detailed error messages, or output of real time
> tunnel status (SA lifetime) etc (for easy pickup by a GUI).

I think those requests are better discussed on the list and then filed
by one of the developers as feature or bug. On a related note, we do
want to present a new "status" output that's more in json style, so
people can write tools to see/filter what they are interested in. The
current "status" tried to stick with the old "ftp style" of prefacing
each line with a XXX status value (error, informational, etc)

> I know that the community for LibreSwan is never going to get anywhere near the size of LibreOffice, but a small amount of marketing could (I hope)
> significantly improve the uptake of LS across the distributions.

Indeed.

> I would be willing to offer my assistance, albeit within my limited technical ability.

I use git-mediawiki to work on our wiki right now, which i find easier
to use than the wiki itself, but you can also use the wiki directly.

I'm happy to take your offer to help us :) Let me know what your wiki
user is, and I can give it some more permissions to make changes.

Paul