[izpack-devel] A few thoughts on the project infrastructures

[Tino Schwarze]

Hi all,

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 05:39:39PM +0100, Julien Ponge wrote:

> I've been thinking a bit about the project infrastructure recently. I
> would like to discuss with you on the website and the developers
> services.

I'm against moving by principle. For me, the BerliOS infrastructure
works very well, I've never had problems (but I'm no active developer at
the moment). 

> // Web site //
> 
> I'm a bit bored with it. I opted for a wiki-style software, but it is
> not that efficient after all. People don't use the free wiki section
> that much, and I have to revert frequent spamming attacks.
> 
> I'm thinking of changing to a Wordpress install with lighter pages so
> as to provide a better communication.

I don't have an opinion regarding the web site. Make it simple, focus on
content.

> BerliOS has however a few glitches:
> * frequent outages (e.g., last week the emails were blocked on the
> mailing-lists for 2-3 days because of spam experiments...)
> * really inconvenient bug/tasks trackers.... (e.g., this is why we ask
> people to report on the list!).
> The later point is really critical: I would like to have better tools
> for the project management.
> 
> I've been looking around for possible options.
> * Tigris, Java.net: they use CollabNet which is no better here (even
> some people at Sun complain of having to use this...)
> * SourceForge: too big, no better tools than BerliOS
> * Google Code: (too?) simple, SVN quota is already too small and the
> file downloads quota is limitating (we won't be able to release from
> there)
> * Gna, Savannah: same codebase as BerliOS/SourceForge, and restricted
> to GPL fans
> * Apache: lots of good tools, but the project needs to be donated then
> incubated there (and it looks like there is some bureaucracy)
> * Codehaus: they are selective, but they offer many great Atlassian
> products (JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, ...) and they also have licenses
> for some nice tools (Clover, etc)

> * rent a virtualized server: we could do everything there, but it
> costs money and it requires a lot of administration.

We could also set up a Mantis... I'm willing to donate the Space and
bandwith (I've got a root server for my SpiritualDesign business anyway
which is mostly idle). I suppose, traffic/load shouldn't be too much
(traffic is unlimited anyway for me, it will just be limited to 10
MBit/s if I get over 1 TB IIRC.) 

I've got all infrastructure in place (Apache, PHP, MySQL, Mail, Backup
etc.), so you're welcome. I've got no mailing list setup yet though and
it's probably too much for me to administer/provide.

> I've been playing with an evaluation license of JIRA: this tool would
> be just great for managing efficiently the project (roadmap, tasks,
> RFEs, bugs, ...). The tool is available free for opensource projects,
> but I don't feel like maintaining a server for it. Apache and Codehaus
> have JIRA instances.

JIRA is Java stuff, right? I don't feel like maintaining that, either,
although we've got a lot of Tomcats running and administered at work.

> One possible solution would be to move the developer services to
> Codehaus: SVN, downloads, mailing-lists, JIRA, wiki. The
> infrastructure looks like to be very good (I've discussed this a lot
> with the Groovy project leader which I know).

If it's only bug tracking: Keep BerliOS, setup own Bug Tracker (which
could be really customized to our needs then). You control izforge.com,
so we could add a DNS name bugs.izforge.com, possibly with own MX and
own mail adresses.

Bye,

Tino.

-- 
www.craniosacralzentrum.de
www.spiritualdesign-chemnitz.de

Tino Schwarze * Lortzingstraße 21 * 09119 Chemnitz