[OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal to find an alternative to Collabnet

Gary Lang gary.lang at autodesk.com
Mon Jul 17 16:13:14 PDT 2006


Allan,

"Is it so important to move things to a common environment for
developers?"

I didn't think this was a discussion about moving. I thought we were
talking about new projects that don't already have an infrastructure
using CN. We already beat the moving current projects horse to death
already. There's no need for a project that has a home now to move to
CN, I think we've all said.

" Is it so important to move things to a common environment for
developers? Is the cost of doing that so high that it starts to cut into
development?"

No it isn't, but also a dead horse. For new projects, it doesn't cut
into development.

You can all choose to believe me or not. I have said that the CN site,
for all its faults, was incredibly easy for MapGuide to be placed onto,
the SCC works, our migration from Perforce was simple, we're up, we get
hits, we handle downloads - lots of them, we get news out, etc.

We spend zero time monitoring it, running it, etc. We spend our time
developing MapGuide and working with our community, which is exactly
what we should be doing.

So it is working for us as an infratructure site. And this seems like a
big benefit for new projects that don't have an infrastructure. What am
I missing?

Rather than beat these dead horses, I'd rather we simply let the web
committee do their thing and create a project for moving the site in
February but in the meantime we get on with the foundation's business
which means taking as much of the overhead of running a project off of
developer's hands as is possible until then, promoting their work, etc. 

If this is developed before February even better. But telling people not
to use the infrastructure now and spending endless cycles talking about
what we already agreed on - i.e. CN is not working well in general - is
not furthering the foundation's charter.

If a project doesn't feel in a rush to do anything and wants to wait,
it's their prerogative, of course.

So does the WebCom have a timeline for making a decision, setting this
up, etc? If I don't see one by October there will be yet another project
setting up yet another site by next February, I can tell you that.
MapGuide isn't about to be homeless. We like hobu's Plone site for
MapServer quite a bit, and will start our discussion around that if we
don't see some progress by OSGeo by October.

I worry about these discussions - which feel circular to me - because I
fear that we will go down in history as the foundation that discussed
content management infrastructure endlessly instead of doing something
great for its projects.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Allan Doyle [mailto:adoyle at eogeo.org] 
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 2:51 PM
To: discuss at mail.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal to find an alternative to
Collabnet

Is it so important to move things to a common environment for
developers? Is the cost of doing that so high that it starts to cut into
development?

Jody's point about matching look and feel sounds like the more important
one. If we work backwards, what end result are we looking for? Surely
not carefully lined up projects, all neatly tucked away into a version
control system with parallel file naming conventions, variable naming
schemes and so on. I'd like to see compatible binary packages for major
platforms, ease of side-by-side installations of components, etc.
Basically the topics we were hitting on in the OpenSDI list.

If projects do the proper copyright/IP management, then it should be ok
to use any tools to do so.

Or am I missing something?

	Allan

On Jul 17, 2006, at 17:37, Jody Garnett wrote:

> Hi Cameron, thanks for keeping discussion open and on the list.  
> Much nicer out in public even when difficult.
>
> From my perspective I got a lot of work to do to get GeoTools ready 
> and Collabnet is the last thing on my mind. I am way more concerned 
> about what the standard Look and Feel ends up being for OSGEO 
> projects... because that I will match.
>
> We origionally started using Confluence for the uDig project and 
> looked into porting the content to Drupal. It really did not work and 
> i would be sorry to say how much time we spent on it. It was 
> interesting how effective donating confluence is to open source 
> projects is for Allisian....
>
> Thanks for quoting the following page, the tables near the bottom were

> started by me to explain why GeoTools is not moving to Collabnet at 
> this time... which is not to say we are not hurting for resources (in 
> the meeting to day we were talking about hosting builds on TOPP and 
> Refractions servers).
>> This page is a good start:
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Infrastructure_Migration
> So what I want is this:
> 1. Web LNF from the webcomm (who I have not had a chance to help with 
> until the geotools IP check is done) 2. Update my confluence sites to 
> match 3. Keep tabs on CollabNet offerings, and how seriously 
> intergrated LnF is as a requirement for OSGEO projects
>
> If the times comes to switch, and it may, it will be based on the 
> least hassle for developers on the project. The performance of 
> confluence on the codehaus is a trouble, and I can no longer export 
> based on the timeouts experienced (bleck).
>
> One serious issue is that most of our navigation structure is based on

> parent child page relationships included in pages via macros, this is 
> the kind of thing that never translates well - even if the base 
> content does. So I am really not going to give this much more thought 
> until it becomes a problem. It is nice having CollabNet as an escape 
> avenue if needed.
>
> All the best,
> Jody
>
>
>
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--
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org




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