I would love if we could start an open and civil discussion about the future of Z-Wave in Home Assistant.
Here is my current understanding of the state of things:
Context:
In November 2019, it was announced that HA would be deprecating the existing Z-Wave integration and moving to the addon for QT-OpenZWave. There was a lot of excitement.
Over a year has passed since then. Initially, there was a lot of movement on fixing bugs and making the integration more usable.
In the past 6 months or so, the project has become stagnant.
Current state:
The initial āFuture of Z-Wave in HAā thread has turned very sour. People are struggling with many issues in the beta (too many to list ā see the thread linked or search the forums). They apparently have been reported here and to GitHub, but those who are in control of the addon, understand how it works, and are able to merge fixes are somewhat MIA. This, while understandable because itās all volunteer-based, is a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people who rely on Z-Wave working.
There have been people bringing up alternatives only to be shut down (somewhat rudely, tbh) without any chance of discussion. I even tried to ask some direct questions about the decision with qt-openzwave, where would be a better place to discuss, etc, but received no responses.
Going forward:
How do we move forward? Those who really know the qt-openzwave code in and out seem to not have interest in helping. Those who understand new projects want to help and are offering their hard work, but are basically being told that their efforts are wasted because the Home Assistant crew does not want to even consider an alternative.