[Incubator] Infrastructure Migration

[Jo Walsh]

dear Jody, thanks for taking the time for this response to what is a
pretty dry discussion. Some answers/comments below. I wanted to
reiterate the reasons why this process has been necessary. The
contract OSGeo currently holds with CollabNet ends Jan 1st. MapGuide's
infrastructure is dependent on it; MapGuide has an infrastructure
budget for next year. Meanwhile the Foundation has requirements to run
a few basic services (web, mail, blogging, document management, wiki
for tutorial / teaching material generation). This is an attempt to
consolidate on something that OSGeo can make good use of from this
potential budget allocation, and pretty much pay to have the work done. 

No project will be obliged, only encouraged to move to new services
and there are varying levels of interest in different components. It
is especially good to have the Java stack perspective as I understand
people there are generally happy-enough with codehaus/confluence but
have related concerns as to CN about ongoing use of a closed-source platform.

On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 10:46:40AM -0700, Jody Garnett wrote:
> Currently we are focused on making sure any OGSEO volunteer time gets 
> put towards the incubation process.

This makes complete sense. (And you are fairly close to graduation
too, right?) Keep focus...

> - maven repository (a highly structured download site suitable for abuse 
> by build tools)

Sure, those of us who have worked on this are all biased towards the
C/interpreted side of the stack and don't know about all your shiny
Java-specific build and release management w4r3z.

> - the usual build and smoke test machine, with artifacts placed into 
> above maven repo

This is borne in mind for the future, I think; Howard's been
experimenting with buildbot for a while; I guess that is in the same
space as maven.  

> We are not against collaboration on infrastructure, apologies if our 
> silence has been taken for lack of interest. I always run into the 
> difficulty that there are other infrastructure projects out there 
> (codehaus, source forge, tigris) and I would rather focus OSGEO effort 
> on other problems. 

Nod, this makes a lot of sense too. Because geotools/geoserver have a good
platform currently and have been putting a lot of effort into it i
would see you as one of the more reasonably reluctant candidates for
moving over. This stance makes sense in a lot of ways. OSGeo could
provide CSS/logo/styling to brand remote sites more effectively, etc. 

> I admit that common branding is an attractive goal,
> and that it does close the loop back into infrastructure.

I would definitely not want to get into any situation where tools migration
for the sake of it became a timesink or a source of contention for any
project. But as outlined above, the Foundation needs a largish subset
of what minimally MapGuide / Mapbender needs to maintain its presence. 
Yes this does work out to be as much about branding and positioning as
it does about wanting the Foundation to be able to manage its own
destiny at a meta level as the projects currently do on their own. 

cheers cheers,


jo