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# PDA Project Update
## Introduction
Hello PDA community members,
My name is Matt Scott, and I am the owner of [Azorian Solutions](https://azorian.solutions), a consultancy for the
Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry. I'm pleased to announce that I have taken ownership of the PDA project and
will be taking over the lead maintainer role, effective immediately.
Please always remember and thank both [Khanh Ngo](https://github.com/ngoduykhanh) and
[Jérôme Becot](https://github.com/jbe-dw) for their efforts in keeping this project alive thus far. Without the effort
of Khanh creating the PDA project and community, and the efforts of Jérôme for holding up the lead maintainer role after
Khanh had to step down, this project would not still be alive today.
With that being said, please read through all the following announcements as they are important if you're an active PDA
user or community member. I intend to make many great enhancements to the project, but it could be a bumpy road ahead.
### Project Maintenance
As it stands today, contributions to the project are at a low. At this point, there is a rather large backlog of issues
and feature requests in contrast to the current maintenance capacities. This is not to say you should lose hope though!
As part of this project transition, some additional contribution interest has been generated and I expect to attract
more with the changes I'm planning to make. In the near future, I may by-pass some usual maintenance processes in order
to expedite some changes to the project that have been outstanding for some time.
This is to say however that unless the project attracts a healthy new contribution base, issues may continue to pile up
as maintenance capacity is rather limited. This is further complicated by the fact that the current code base is harder
to follow naturally since it largely lacks uniformity and standards. This lack of uniformity has lead to a difficult
situation that makes implementing certain changes less effective. This status quo is not uncommon with projects born how
PDA was born, so it's unfortunate but not unexpected.
### Change of Direction
In order to reorganize the project and get it on a track to a future that allows it to contend with other commercial
quality products, I had to make many considerations to the proficiencies of two unique paths forward to achieve this
goal. One path forward is seemingly obvious, continue maintaining the current code base while overhauling it to shift it
towards the envisioned goal. The other path is a fresh solution design with a complete rebuild.
The answer to the aforementioned decision might seem obvious to those of you who typically favor the "don't reinvent the
wheel" mentality. I'm unclear of the details surrounding the original use-case that drove the development of this
project, but I don't believe it was on-par with some use-cases we see today which include operators handling many tens
of thousands of zones and/or records. There are many changes that have been (sometimes) haphazardly implemented which
has lead to the previously mentioned lack of uniformity among other issues. To put it simply, I'm not sure if the
project ever had a grand vision per se but instead was mostly reactionary to community requests.
I believe that the current project has served the community fairly well from what I can tell. I know the product has
certainly helped me in my professional efforts with many environments. I also believe that it's time to pivot so that
the project can realize it's true potential, considering the existing user base. For this reason, I am beginning the
planning phase of a project overhaul. This effort will involve a complete re-engineering of the project's contribution
standards and requirements, technology stack, and project structure.
This was not an easy decision to come to but one must appreciate that there aren't as many people that can get very
excited about working on the current project code base. The current project has many barriers to entry which I intend to
drastically impact with future changes. The reality is that it's easier to gain contribution participation with a new
build effort as it offers an opportunity to own a part of the project with impactful contributions.
### Project Enhancements
Since this is the beginning of a rebirth of the project so to speak, I want to implement a new operational tactic that
will hopefully drive contributions through incentive. Many of us understand that any project, needs a leader to stay on
track and organized. If everything were a democratic process, it would take too long and suffer unnecessary challenges.
With that being said, I do believe that there is plenty of opportunity through-out various development phases of the
project to allow for a democratic process where the community contributors and members can participate in the
decision-making.
The plan to achieve the aforementioned democratic goal is to centralize communications and define some basic structured
processes. To do this, more effective methods of communication have been implemented to allow those interested in
contributing to easily participate in fluid, open communication. This has already been proving to be quite effective for
exchanging ideas and visions while addressing the issue with contributors living in vastly different time zones. This is
effectively a private chat hosted by the PDA project using Mattermost (a Slack-like alternative).
Even if you aren't in a position to directly contribute work to the project, you can still contribute by participating
in these very important and early discussions that will impact the solution engineering. If the PDA project is an
important tool in your organization, I encourage you to join the conversation and contribute where applicable your
use-cases. Having more insight on the community use-cases will only benefit the future of this project.
If you're interested in joining the conversation, please email me at
[admin@powerdnsadmin.org](mailto:admin@powerdnsadmin.org) for an invitation.
### Re-branding
As part of this project transition, I will also be changing the naming scheme in order to support the future development
efforts toward a newly engineered solution. The current PDA project will ultimately become known as the "PDA Legacy"
application. This change will help facilitate the long-term solution to take the branding position of the existing
solution. Another effort I will be making is to get an app landing page online at the project's new domain:
[powerdnsadmin.org](https://powerdnsadmin.org). This will act as one more point of online exposure for the project which
will hopefully lend itself well to attracting additional community members.
### Contribution Requirements
Another big change that will be made with the new project, will be well-defined contribution requirements. I realize
these requirements can be demotivating for some, but they are a necessary evil to ensure the project actually achieves
its goals effectively. It's important to always remember that strict requirements are to everyone's benefit as they push
for order where chaos is quite destructive.
### Closing
I hope these announcements garner more participation in the PDA community. The project definitely needs more help to
achieve any goal at this point, so your participation is valued!

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# PDA Project Update
## Introduction
Hello PDA community members,
I know it has been quite awhile since the last formal announcement like this. Things have been quite busy and difficult
for me both professional and personally. While I try hard to never make my problems someone else's problems, I do
believe it's important to be transparent with the community. I'm not going to go into details, but I will say that I
have been dealing with some mental health issues that have been quite challenging. I'm not one to give up though,
so I'm pushing through and trying to get back on track.
With that being said, let's jump into the announcements.
### Project Maintenance
Granted I haven't been nearly as active on the project as I would like to be, I have been keeping an eye on things and
trying to keep up with the maintenance. I know there are a lot of issues and feature requests that have been piling up,
and I'm sorry for that. Even if I had been more active in recent months, it would have not changed the true root cause
of the issue.
This project was started out of a need for an individual's own use-case. I don't believe it was never intended to be a
commercial quality product nor a community project. It did however gain traction quickly and the community grew. This
is a great thing, but it also comes with some challenges. The biggest challenge is that the project was never designed
to be a community project. This means that the project lacks many of the things that are required to effectively manage
a community project. This is not to say that the project is doomed, but many of the fast-paced changes combined with
the lack of standards has lead to a difficult situation that makes implementing certain changes incredibly unproductive
and quite often, entirely counter-productive.
After many years of accepting contributions from those who are not professional developers, the project has become quite
difficult to maintain. This is not to say that I don't appreciate the contributions, but it's important to understand
that the state of the code-base for the project is not in a good place. This is not uncommon with projects born how PDA
was born, so it's unfortunate but not unexpected.
As of today, there are so many dependencies and a large amount of very poorly implemented features that it's difficult
to make any changes without breaking many other pieces. This is further complicated by the fact that the current code
base is harder to follow naturally since it largely lacks uniformity and standards. This lack of uniformity has lead to
a situation where automated regression testing is not possible. This is a very important aspect of any project that
expects to be able to make changes without breaking things. This is also a very important aspect of any project that
expects to be able to accept contributions from the community with minimum management resources.
The hard reality is that the majority of stakeholders in the project are not professional developers. This naturally
means the amount of people that can offer quality contributions is very limited. This problem is further aggravated by
the poor quality feature implementation which is very hard to follow, even for seasoned developers like myself. So many
seemingly small issues that have been reported, have lead to finding that the resolution is not as simple as it seems.
### New Direction
As I previously stated in my last formal announcement, we would be working towards a total replacement of the project.
Unfortunately, this is not a simple task, and it's not something that can be done quickly. Furthermore, with
increasingly limited capacity in our own lives to work on this, we are essentially drowning in a sea of technical debt
created by the past decisions of the project to accept all contributions. We have essentially reached a point where
far too much time and resources are being wasted just to attempt to meet the current demand of requests on the current
edition of PDA. This is a tragedy because the efforts that are invested into the current edition, really aren't
creating true progress for the project, but instead merely delaying the inevitable.
As I have stated before to many community members, one aspect of taking over management of this project to ultimately
save it and keep it alive, would involve making hard decisions that many will not agree with. It's unfortunate that
many of those who are less than supportive of these decisions, often lack the appropriate experience to understand the
importance of these decisions. I'm not saying that I'm always right, but I am saying that it's not hard to see where
this is headed without some drastic changes.
With all of that being said, it's time for me to make some hard decisions. I have decided that the best course of
action is to stop accepting contributions to the current edition of PDA. At this point, due to the aforementioned
issues that lead to breaking the application with seemingly simple changes, it's just not worth the effort to try to
keep up with the current edition. This is not to say that I'm giving up on the project, but instead I'm going to
re-focus my efforts on the new edition of PDA. This is the only way to ensure that the project will survive and
hopefully thrive in the future.
I will not abandon the current set of updates that were planned for the next release of `0.4.2` however. I have
re-scheduled that release to be out by the end of the year. This will be the last release of the current edition of
PDA. The consensus from some users is that the current edition is stable enough to be used in production environments.
I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do believe that it's stable enough to be used in production
environments with the understanding that it's not a commercial quality product.
### Future Contributions
For those of you wondering about contributions to the new edition of PDA, the answer for now is simple. I won't be
accepting any contributions to the new edition until I can achieve a stable release that delivers the core features of
the current edition. This is not to say that I won't be accepting any contributions at all, but instead that I will be
very selective about what contributions I accept. I believe this is the only way to ensure that a solid foundation not
only takes shape, but remains solid.
It is well understood that many developers have their own ways of doing things, but it's important to understand
that this project is not a personal project. This project is a community project and therefore must be treated as such.
This means that the project must be engineered in a way that allows for the community to participate in the development
process. This is not possible if the project is not engineered in a way that is easy to follow and understand.
### Project Enhancements
It should be understood that one of the greatest benefits of this pivot is that it will allow for a more structured
development process. As a result of that, the project could potentially see a future where it adopts a whole new set of
features that weren't previously imagined. One prime example of this could be integration with registrar APIs. This
could make easy work of tasks such as DNSSEC key rotation, which is currently a very manual process.
I am still working on final project requirements for additional phases of the new PDA edition, but these additions
won't receive any attention until the core features are implemented. I will be sure to make announcements as these
requirements are finalized. It is my intention to follow a request for proposal (RFP) process for these additional
features. This will allow the community to participate in the decision-making process for future expansion of the
project.
### Closing
I hope that by the time you have reached this point in the announcement, that I have elicited new hope for the
long-term future of the project. I know that many of you have been waiting for a long time for some of the features that have been
requested. I know that many of you have been waiting for a long time for some of the issues to be resolved, for
requested features to be implemented, and for the project to be more stable. It's unfortunate that it has taken this
long to get to this point, but this is the nature of life itself. I hope that you can understand that this is the only
reasonable gamble that the project survives and thrives in the future.