I have spent much time reviewing the "Clear statement about confluence"
discussion on the infra list. My general impression is that infra said
No (at least until some issues are resolved). I have mentioned this in
an earlier email but got no response.
I also got the impression from the infra list that in the past others
have offered to support software that has been installed and then didn't
live up to their promise leaving the problem with the overburdened infra
people, which hasn't helped our cause.
A lot of the issues infra raised sounded valid to me. I don't think we
are helping the relationship with the infra people by just ignoring
their concerns and doing our own thing in a zone. The primary purpose
of zones are for projects that need to run their project's own software
(e.g. Tomcat in a Tomcat zone). It was noted that mission critical
services should not be run in the zone. I would consider the wiki to be
mission critical to the project and its users.
As much as I like Confluence, I don't think it is wise to rely upon
until we can get buy-in of the infra people. This may take some time
while until some of the issues raised by infra are addressed. We can't
afford to have it taken away from us down the road after investing a lot
of time into it.
Has much thought been given to what the new incubator projects that were
previously using Confluence are going to do?
The following are some of the issues that the infra people had that need
to be addressed/debated over time:
- How many projects and developers want it?
- Who is going join the infra people to help support it (but not install
it). Hardware is not the issue
- Need stability/performance issues resolved (get it working with front
end cache, handle spidering etc.)
- How easy to import from MoinMoin? They don't want to run two Wikis.
- How easy to export when we move to the next Wiki?
- Does it support SVN as a store?
- Does it support farms?
- How well does it support the mandatory oversight requirements?
PROPOSAL:
Focus our energy on getting good content in our existing wiki whilst the
Confluence issue is resolved in parallel (this may take a number of
Geronimo releases...). Once the move to confluence is given the go
ahead we can then "plan" the migration from the existing wiki.
There are other ways to do documentation that can be exported to both
PDF and HTML. These other methods also allow documentaton (the manuals)
to be edited off-line and stored in svn.
John
Jason Dillon wrote:
Hiya, I think we need to decide if we are going to keep using
Confluence or not. And if we are which instance we are going to use,
and then shutdown the other.
I've already imported the GERONIMO space that Atlassian is hosting
twice, and already more changes have gone into that instance, so I
will need to reimport again. Not a huge problem, but its not really
trivial.
I believe that Confluence is a great tool, and is a huge bonus for
our community to create and manage a rich set of documentation. So
obviously I'm down to use it.
So, what I'd like to know is if we should use the instance on our
zone, and shutdown the other instance?
--jason
