Project Infrastructure Migration 2007

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Revision as of 22:00, 28 March 2006 by Warmerdam (talk | contribs) (added starting notes on mailing lists.)
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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.

Some projects currently use CVS (or SVN?) triggers to launch actions such as IRC (via CIA-bot) notifications, mailing list notifications and web site updates. Collabnet provides a mailing list for updates, but does not allow arbitrary commit hooks (as far as I (FW) know).

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.

Bug / Issue Tracking

Currently members projects use:

  • Bugzilla: GDAL, MapServer, OSSIM
  • Jira: GeoTools, MapBuilder
  • Wiki: Mapbender
  • RT: GRASS
  • CN Issue Tracker: MapGuider

CollabNet offers an issue tracker with roughly comparible capabities to other bug trackers. (please note significant distinctions here) However, it is not clear that there is a clean way to migrate bugs from other systems to the CN issue tracker. Lacking this it seems unlikely the projects with substantial historical bug databases will be eager to migrate to the CN infrastructure.

Should any projects migrate to the CN issue tracker, it is also unclear that there is any way to migrate bugs out again should we drop CN support, though apparently CN does support an XML export of the database so hand crafting tools should be *possible* with some lossiness.

It would seem that migration to (and from) the CN bug tracker are going to be painful.

Mailing Lists / Forums =

Currently member projects use:

  • Mailman: GDAL, GRASS, OSSIM, MapBuilder, Mapbender, GeoTools, MapServer
  • CN Mailing Lists: MapGuide
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