OpenLayers is currently (graciously) hosted by MetaCarta. This has worked out quite well so far, but using MetaCarta hosting has meant we've had to 'roll our own' system for authentication -- and as many people know, this particular system is rather hacky: an email to the PSC list to generate a new username, which requires manual intervention.
Part of the reason that I've never improved upon this system is that I've always felt that it would be better to invest in moving to OSGeo infrastructure. For a while, this was difficult, but recently, OSGeo has found some solutiosn which make this technically possible. I'd like to suggest that we move to OSGeo infrastructure for hosting Trac and the Wiki as soon as possible. I'm less sure on the website and mailing lists. Benefits of moving svn + wiki: * Users can create their own userid -- or use their existing osgeo userid -- to login to either. * Users creating tickets in trac will automatically get email notification on updates of their tickets. * It will be possible to register oneself as a "CC" on a bug without exposing an email address to the public web. * Shared administrative resources with OSGeo -- which means that it's not just me who can update the server, but instead the set of people who maintain the OSGeo servers * Shared OSGeo backup infrastructure. Currently, we're backing up OpenLayers internally to MetaCarta, and exporting data to OSGeo: moving to OSGeo infrastructure allows for the bcakups to be maintained by the foundation. The strongest one to me is that users will be able to create their own accounts via an automated process - no humans involved. I think this is very important. I have a couple of questions which I don't personally have an answer to yet: Currently, all OSGeo svn, trac, etc. live under URLs like http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ , http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/ . I do not know if it is possible to configure svn.openlayers.org to point directly to the OSGeo server, or if it would be preferred for administrative purposes to have it at svn.osgeo.org/openlayers/ . Obviously, even if it's trivial in an administrative way, it would be more in line with the rest of the foundation-hosted projects to have the URL be svn.osgeo.org/openlayers/ . Assuming that there is sufficiently good infrastructure setup to allow for users to migrate from one to the other, would it make sense to make the primary OpenLayers SVN URL be the osgeo.org/ form? Same question applies to trac. I view these aspects of the project as 'internal' -- where SVN lives doesn't matter much, so long as it's correctly linked everywhere -- and would be in support of moving into the osgeo.org namespace for svn and trac, with appropriate redirects. A similar question applies to mailing lists. Currently, these lists are [email protected] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] Moving to OSGeo infrastructure would probably mean moving these to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and openlayers-trac and openlayers-commits.) Would it make sense to move these, with proper redirects to lists.osgeo.org for both the email addresses and the archives? Speaking as (essentially) the sole maintainer of the machine that openlayers.org is hosted on, I'd like to move off whatever we can to OSGeo infrastructure. As you can see here, one important piece of the infrastructure piece is left aside, and that's the sandboxes, website, etc. I think the important aspect of those changes is related to the regular 'svn up' and rebuilding that happens. In the past, we've discovered that doing these in post-commit hooks is bad, because it takes too long to commit (which would be een more true now with the NaturalDocs stuff). However, I think that we can devise a technical solution -- using a post-commit hook to write a revision number, and a cronjob to check whether changes have been made and rebuild if so. I think this would allow us to move to OSGeo infrastructure for the website as well, though there would obviously need to be some technical discussions for what we could do as far as doc regeneration, etc. goes. This is not a motion yet: its a request for comments. I'm interested in moving for a number of reasons, both technical and social. Although there are other people at MetaCarta with 'the keys' to the servers, I'd like to move that out to the foundation -- and I see that we get a fair amount of benefit from that. I'm hopeful that others agree, and we can discuss the best way to move forward with the goal of making the process smooth. Feedback, comments, suggestions, concerns are welcome. (Note that at the moment, I'm not looking for technical advice on the way to set up redirects or anything like that: we can address that after we address whether, and how, we *want* to move first.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
