Home Assistant, ESPHome and ZWaveJS2MQTT plugin removal - TrueNAS CORE

[tprelog]

I've submitted a pull request to have the following three plugins removed from TrueNAS CORE

1. Home Assistant Core
2. ESPHome
3. ZWave-JS 2 MQTT


Home Assistant and ESPHome are simply not supported on FreeBSD. We were lucky for many years that these projects "just worked", but with recent changes this is no longer the case. Trying to open issues, file bug reports or submitting pull request to support or fix issues related to FreeBSD will be marked as unsupported and closed by the projects developers.

The ZWave-JS 2 MQTT project has recently been renamed to ZWave JS UI which broke the current plugin installation script. While it's not difficult to fix the script itself, the plugin should also renamed. However, I am no longer using TrueNAS CORE or any iocage jails so continued maintenance is becoming less feasible and I don't think it makes sense for me to update and re-release the plugin under a new name.

 

[FrankNAS]

This is sad news. As of 2022.7.7 version of Home Assistant Core, it was working fine under both FreeBSD 13.1 and TrueNAS Core 13.1. Even sadder that they won't accept pull requests

 

[wintered]

Run into this problem were I have attempted to submit PR's to continue operation on FreeBSD to just have them closed with the "we dont support FreeBSD".

I continued a fork of the esphome component, but have since dropped this and switched to MQTT instead which works perfectly.

I'm assuming longer term there is going to be more and more breakage which will likely result in my move to TrueNAS Scale.

 

[tprelog]

Run into this problem were I have attempted to submit PR's to continue operation on FreeBSD to just have them closed with the "we dont support FreeBSD".

I believe yours are some of the PRs I'm referring too. Even though the Home Assistant ADR states

We are open for contributions that improve compatibility with a community-supported method as long as they do not impact officially supported methods, add a significant amount of code exceptions or future maintenance burden on the Home Assistant development team.

It was this statement made by Frenck that made me finally decided to give up on the Home Assistant plugin

Unfortunately, we learned they do add a maintenance burden. Mostly in terms of issue reports, chasing ghosts, and having discussions like these (sorry to say). Which is covered by the ADR.

Please consider running a way that is supported by the project.

This PR has been declined.

../Frenck

Someone managed to get a chance into bleak though. I just tried Home Assistant release 2022.10.0 using default_config and it didn't shit the bed.

 

[FrankNAS]

bleak works out of happenstance rather than the addition of FreeBSD platform support:
was originally in bleak/__init__.py
now its in bleak/backends/scanner.py

Homeassistant have, as of writing, almost 450 open PRs and 1.5k+ open issues on home-assistant/core alone and they have 91(!) public repos. It could be they are already overwhelmed with having to deal with users on supported platforms/hardware/configs and simply lack the resources to have someone do code review on PRs for an esoteric OS.

It is totally understandable that the homeassistant devs don't support exotic OSes but I feel they should really consider changing their contribution guidelines to state they will not entertain PRs expanding the functionality of their product to otherwise unsupported platforms.

 

[tprelog]

bleak works out of happenstance rather than the addition of FreeBSD platform support:
was originally in bleak/__init__.py
now its in bleak/backends/scanner.py

Got it! This comment was left in one of the Home Assistant issues and I thought it had implied some sort of fix

This project doesn’t support FreeBSD, although it might work in 2022.10.x because of changes in bleak. Long term you are setting yourself up for a headache though since nothing is being tested on FreeBSD and you can expect additional breakage in the future.

It could be they are already overwhelmed with having to deal with users on supported platforms/hardware/configs and simply lack the resources to have someone do code review on PRs for an esoteric OS.

It is totally understandable that the homeassistant devs don't support exotic OSes but I feel they should really consider changing their contribution guidelines to state they will not entertain PRs expanding the functionality of their product to otherwise unsupported platforms.

I realize my replies have been sort but I didn't intend for that to sound negative. I agree with your thoughts, 1000%

 

[tprelog]

The lack of an update for ZWAVE-JS-UI has left some people hanging while they find alternative solutions. If you have found yourself in a similar situation this should get you running again. Basically we just need to rename the upstream repository on two lines.

First open the install script for editing

Code:

iocage console $JAIL_NAME
# Press 1 to exit the menu
ee bin/install_zj2m

Now on lines 13 and 18 we need to change zwavejs2mqtt to zwave-js-ui

Code:

## Line 13 - BEFORE
  local release="https://api.github.com/repos/zwave-js/zwavejs2mqtt/releases/latest"
## Line 13 - AFTER
  local release="https://api.github.com/repos/zwave-js/zwave-js-ui/releases/latest"

Code:

## Line 18 - BEFORE
  cd "${workdir}"/*zwavejs2mqtt* || goodbye 1 "failed to get release" ; echo " OK"
## Line 18 - AFTER
  cd "${workdir}"/*zwave-js-ui* || goodbye 1 "failed to get release" ; echo " OK"

To save and exit, press ESC then press ENTER twice

Now you should be able to start the menu again by typing menu and press enter.
Use the menu option 4 to upgrade and finally option 5 to start zwave-js-ui.