[pgrouting-dev] State of OSGeo migration

[Daniel Kastl]

Hi PSC,

Many weeks have passed since we decided to migrate to OSGeo environment as
described here:
http://pgrouting.postlbs.org/wiki/RFC/02
Sorry for not giving any updates on the migration progress.

The beginning was very promising and I thought it won't take a week to have
everything moved to OSGeo servers. But then it got stuck with SVN and nobody
of the OSGeo administrators was willing or able to import the SVN dump nor
giving any clear answer to my emails on the mailing list. You can find
emails and tickets in SAC TRAC and mailing list archives.

What could be achieved so far:

   - user mailing list migrated to OSGeo servers
   - dev mailing list created on OSGeo server
   - download directory created under http://download.osgeo.org/pgrouting/

Everything went quick but SVN migration became frustrating and I started to
think if it's really a good idea to use OSGeo servers if the OSGeo
administrators seem to be a bit too much busy. They are all volunteers, so I
appreciate their work. But there were a couple of issues with the servers
the last weeks, so I started to look for alternatives:

   - SUBVERSION alternative:
   Recently a lot of projects use distributed version control systems like
   Git, Mercurial or Bazaar. Especially Git seems to become more and more
   popular. Just a few weeks ago OpenLayers started to work on version 3 using
   Github for example.
   In my opinion a move to Git would make participation of developers
   without commit access easier. It would allow others to make use of version
   control without losing versioning information, so it would allow us to bring
   changes from other projects back into the main project. You see, I'm still
   hoping for contributions ;-)

   - FORUM alternative:
   The forum is a problem in my opinion. First it's missing notification,
   second it's more or less Anton and me answering 99% of the questions, and
   third it attracts a lot of spam, which I'm tired to delete. Spam filters
   don't work. On the other hand it's a lot more popular than the mailing list,
   so we would probably take a away a popular resource for pgRouting users. It
   seems the entry level to ask in a forum is a lot lower than to signup for
   the mailing list.
   So my idea would be something like "Stackoverflow". There is an open
   source alternative called "Shapado", which you can install on your own
   server, but also use a hosted installation. At the moment I would prefer the
   latter, and to see how it looks like I setup this for testing:
   http://ask.pgrouting.org/

   - TRAC WIKI alternative:
   The number of TRAC users is probably already several thousand ... 99%
   spam accounts though. You can't delete them anymore through the web
   interface, because user management with TRAC sucks. On the other hand, there
   are just a few people editing the TRAC wiki, so I don't think a wiki is
   really necessary. People tend to write their recipes in their own blog
   anyway.
   I would propose to use Sphinx documentation generation to produce static
   HTML and PDF as so many other OSGeo projects do now. My experience with
   Sphinx is very good since I wrote the FOSS4G workshop manual with it, and
   also the pgRouting chapters of the next LiveDVD documentationt. We can keep
   the website documents under version control and make it accessible under
   pgrouting.org domain (there is no problem to host it on the Georepublic
   server from my side).

   - TRAC TICKETS alternative:
   Probably it would be easiest to use the Github ticketing system if we
   decide to use Github.

If you have any comments, please let eevryone know.
Otherwise I would be interested to know who agrees or disagrees with this
change of RFC 2.
If everyone agrees I will change RFC 2 (or make RFC 3) and proceed like
described above.

Best regards,
Daniel




-- 
Georepublic UG & Georepublic Japan
eMail: daniel.kastl at georepublic.de
Web: http://georepublic.de
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