But it’s true, this extended wait delay is half annoying, half worrying.
Worrying: come on, can that be normal, might there be inside trouble and might the future of virtualmin be threatened?!?
It also raises the possibility of a “truck factor” issue (you know the metaphor? Imagine a truck hitting a developer, does it, or not, mean a project dies with the truck’s victim?). If the team behind a project is too small, personal issues making life difficult for a team member may jeopardize the entire thing, and now, with those 6 months with hardly any communication, I’d wager many of us have started to ask ourselves if it’s not something of that sort.
Annoying: it’s not like we’re with a LTS version, Debian doesn’t have that long a lifetime before a version goes obsolete, and we’re now already 6 months past the release of Debian 10. The future Debian 10 servers risk to be, comparatively speaking, quite short-lived, it will be a bother.
And yet, a simple, brief thing would magically sort the issue: COMMUNICATION. A simple announcement to tell what’s going on and clear doubts.
“We’re working on fine details that got a lot more complicated than planned. No worries, it will come. No ETA, or an ETA.” “The team’s gone postal because of unrelated issues, apologies but at least you know”. Or “A key team member goes through a very hard time in life, we are sure you will understand resolving his problems come first” - and we’ll totally understand, if - IF - we are told.
As EcchiOli said, I would very much prefer to stick with VirtualMin. I have spent the past few days extensively researching a few other major options like ISPConfig, Sentora, VestaCP - and all of them are lacking, they don’t have important features like iptables management, built-in 2-factor authentication, support for PostgreSQL server management, etc, etc (all features that I use and don’t want to have to do via command line or add a bunch of unsupported hacks to build them in).
Communication is definitely a huge issue here … not sure what is going on, what has happened with Joe or whoever else. I don’t know how large the VirtualMin team is or who actually works on it? But if we take a look at the VirtualMin GitHub Repo: https://github.com/virtualmin/virtualmin-gpl/commits/master
List of commits shows “jcameron” (seems to be the guy that also builds WebMin) - so it does not appear that anyone has been hit by any trucks fortunately.
With all that said, I’m making an attempt to hack the current/latest install script to UNOFFICIALLY support Debian 10, based on the assumption that the “test” code they’ve been using for Buster is already built into their Universal repo - you can follow this here: https://www.virtualmin.com/comment/820559#comment-820559