Project Infrastructure Migration 2007

This document attempts to discuss the needs of projects currenting going through incubation. It attempts to address infrastructure needs, migration strategies to OSGeo servers, and migration strategies to mitigate disruption if OSGeo stops using CollabNet services.

Project Infrastructure Needs

 * Web pages
 * Source Control
 * Bug/Issue Tracking
 * Mailing lists / Forums
 * Download server (http/ftp - binaries, source and data)
 * Wiki
 * Automated Build/Smoke Test System

Web Pages
Currently the members projects use:
 * Wiki: OSSIM (Twiki), GeoTools (Confluence), MapBuilder (Confluence), Mapbender (Mediawiki)
 * CMS: MapServer (Plone)
 * Static HTML: MapGuide, GRASS
 * Doxygen (nightly generated HTML): GDAL

CollabNet offers static HTML pages under SVN for web sites. This works fine for MapGuide, GRASS and GDAL. Not acceptable to MapServer. Migration is acceptable for Mapbender. Not sure about OSSIM, MapBuilder or GeoTools.

It would seem that a wiki solution for the web site should be offered.

For MapGuide, GRASS and GDAL migrating into the CollabNet website mechanism is no problem. Migrating out again (if needed) should also be straight forward. Migrating in and out for other projects would be moderately difficult due to all the reformatting needed.

Source Control
Some projects now using SVN, while others use CVS.

CollabNet offers both.

Migrating in should be quite easy. The main downside is that all existing committer authentication will be lost, and will need to be resetup via the CollabNet infrastructure.

CVS projects might want to take this opportunity to consider SVN which is superior technology. Howard Butler is knowledgable about how to do a CVS to SVN transition that preserves history. This would of course add some extra disruption for developers.

Migrating out of Collabnet SVN is pretty easy assuming Collabnet provides access to the raw SVN archive (which they have agreed to do). The main disruption would be related to user authentication and a new location. SVN is open source so there is no need to change to a new tool if migrating out.