[pgrouting-dev] State of OSGeo migration

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Daniel,

Sounds like a frustrating experience. Just an FYI to put things in 
perspective. One (or more) of the OSGeo servers got hacked and I think 
rootkited recently which has had the admins working overtime trying to 
setup replacement servers and to clean up the mess that that caused.

Daniel Kastl wrote:
> 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:

You have only discussed alternative software and not alternative hosting 
opportunities, like SourceForge, Google, other OSGeo supporters like 
MapGears, etc.

>     * 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 ;-)

Personally, I like subversion because I know it and it is used on most 
of the other projects that I use. I suppose I can learn Git if we were 
to move that direction. I think OpenLayers is moving that direction for 
Rev 3.0.

Another option would be to host it in SVN on say SourceForge.

>     * 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/

Ha, I was not aware that we had a forum. I prefer a mailing list that is 
gated to nabble. We do not have a lot of traffic on the list and spam is 
not a big problem there. If we didn't have a forum, most of the spam 
would go away, casual viewers could read about it in nabble and serious 
users that need help would join the list for it.

>     * 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
>       <http://pgrouting.org> domain (there is no problem to host it on
>       the Georepublic server from my side).

Again, you can get svn, trac, wiki all integrated at SourceForge. Maybe 
I'm wrong but I don't see that much spam on the OSGeo wiki's because you 
have to have an OsGeo login and if you spam any wiki you get booted 
pretty quickly.

For documentation +1 on Sphinx (this is ReStructed Text, correct?) and 
keeping them under version control.

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

The OpenLayers team looks at the Github ticketing system and said it was 
poor and they decided to keep tickets in trac.

> 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.

I appreciate all your efforts in this and can empathize with your 
frustration when getting this done is largely at the hands of over 
worked admins. I need to look at the ticket thread, but has OSGeo said 
no we are overloaded? or when we get to it? or what? I assume that once 
we are moved it would be less of a hassle and would be handled in the 
normal course of their business.

So, I guess I'm asking is this a case of wait to get the job done at 
OSGeo, or we really don't think it will get done or even if it gets done 
we don't think they can support our small project for whatever reason?

-1 on changing direction, at least until I have more information.

Sorry for the delayed response to this and many thanks for all you 
initiative to tackle this task which has gotten bogged down.

Best regards,
   -Steve

> Best regards,
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Georepublic UG & Georepublic Japan
> eMail: daniel.kastl at georepublic.de <mailto:daniel.kastl at georepublic.de>
> Web: http://georepublic.de
> 
> 
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