[OpenLayers-Dev] RFC: Migrating OpenLayers SVN + Trac to OSGeo infrastructure

[Christopher Schmidt]

OpenLayers is currently (graciously) hosted by MetaCarta. This has
worked out quite well so far, but using MetaCarta hosting has meant
we've had to 'roll our own' system for authentication -- and as many
people know, this particular system is rather hacky: an email to the PSC
list to generate a new username, which requires manual intervention.

Part of the reason that I've never improved upon this system is that
I've always felt that it would be better to invest in moving to OSGeo
infrastructure. For a while, this was difficult, but recently, OSGeo has
found some solutiosn which make this technically possible. 

I'd like to suggest that we move to OSGeo infrastructure for hosting
Trac and the Wiki as soon as possible. I'm less sure on the website and
mailing lists.

Benefits of moving svn + wiki:
 * Users can create their own userid -- or use their existing osgeo
   userid -- to login to either.
 * Users creating tickets in trac will automatically get email notification
   on updates of their tickets.
 * It will be possible to register oneself as a "CC" on a bug without
   exposing an email address to the public web.
 * Shared administrative resources with OSGeo -- which means that it's
   not just me who can update the server, but instead the set of people
   who maintain the OSGeo servers
 * Shared OSGeo backup infrastructure. Currently, we're backing up
   OpenLayers internally to MetaCarta, and exporting data to OSGeo:
   moving to OSGeo infrastructure allows for the bcakups to be
   maintained by the foundation.
 
The strongest one to me is that users will be able to create their own
accounts via an automated process - no humans involved. I think this is
very important.

I have a couple of questions which I don't personally have an answer to
yet:

Currently, all OSGeo svn, trac, etc. live under URLs like
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ , http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/ . I do not know
if it is possible to configure svn.openlayers.org to point directly to
the OSGeo server, or if it would be preferred for administrative
purposes to have it at svn.osgeo.org/openlayers/ . Obviously, even if
it's trivial in an administrative way, it would be more in line with the
rest of the foundation-hosted projects to have the URL be
svn.osgeo.org/openlayers/ . Assuming that there is sufficiently good
infrastructure setup to allow for users to migrate from one to the
other, would it make sense to make the primary OpenLayers SVN URL be the
osgeo.org/ form?

Same question applies to trac.

I view these aspects of the project as 'internal' -- where SVN lives
doesn't matter much, so long as it's correctly linked everywhere -- and
would be in support of moving into the osgeo.org namespace for svn and
trac, with appropriate redirects.

A similar question applies to mailing lists. Currently, these lists are
dev at openlayers.org and users at openlayers.org. Moving to OSGeo
infrastructure would probably mean moving these to
openlayers-users at lists.osgeo.org and openlayers-dev at lists.osgeo.org (and
openlayers-trac and openlayers-commits.) Would it make sense to move
these, with proper redirects to lists.osgeo.org for both the email
addresses and the archives?

Speaking as (essentially) the sole maintainer of the machine that
openlayers.org is hosted on, I'd like to move off whatever we can to
OSGeo infrastructure. As you can see here, one important piece of the
infrastructure piece is left aside, and that's the sandboxes, website,
etc. I think the important aspect of those changes is related to the
regular 'svn up' and rebuilding that happens. In the past, we've
discovered that doing these in post-commit hooks is bad, because it
takes too long to commit (which would be een more true now with the
NaturalDocs stuff). However, I think that we can devise a technical
solution -- using a post-commit hook to write a revision number, and a
cronjob to check whether changes have been made and rebuild if so. I
think this would allow us to move to OSGeo infrastructure for the
website as well, though there would obviously need to be some technical
discussions for what we could do as far as doc regeneration, etc. goes.

This is not a motion yet: its a request for comments. I'm interested in
moving for a number of reasons, both technical and social. Although
there are other people at MetaCarta with 'the keys' to the servers, I'd
like to move that out to the foundation -- and I see that we get a fair
amount of benefit from that. I'm hopeful that others agree, and we can
discuss the best way to move forward with the goal of making the process
smooth.

Feedback, comments, suggestions, concerns are welcome.

(Note that at the moment, I'm not looking for technical advice on the
way to set up redirects or anything like that: we can address that after
we address whether, and how, we *want* to move first.)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta