On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 8:51 AM, Gavin McDonald <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Rob Weir [mailto:[email protected]] >> Sent: Tuesday, 29 November 2011 10:15 PM >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: Re: Business models that will not work [was: Re: Can we update our >> migration status table?] >> >> On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:09 PM, Pedro Giffuni <[email protected]> wrote: >> > FWIW; >> > >> > I think a central site for hosting AOO extensions would be welcome. It >> > would be fine to have such a site sponsored by donations and web >> > publicity, and offering a share of technical support and commercial >> > extensions would be fine too. >> > >> >> Compare, for example, Apache Maven with Sonatype's Maven Central. >> This is similar to AOO and Extensions. > > I haven’t really read this thread, but I have a server here in AU if there > really is > nowhere else to host this stuff. Are there any specs on what's required? > > Or, shoot me if I got the wrong end of the stick. >
Yes, that is the wrong end of the stick. But it is an interesting side of the stick as well, so I'll move it to its own thread, so we can explore the options. We currently have an extensions repository and a template repository, kindly hosted by OSUOSL (http://osuosl.org/) on our subdomains: extensions.services.openoffice.org templates.services.openoffice.org These repositories carry 3rd extensions and templates under a wide variety of licenses, including a mix of open source licenses, copyleft and non-copyleft, as well as non-open source licensed "freeware" and "trial-ware" packages. Because of these various licenses, I think it is unlikely to be something that we could host at Apache, even in just binary form. So what are our options? ==Option 1: Remain at OSUOSL== We could remain with OSUOSL hosting. However, the existing site is very unstable. For this approach to be practical we'd need a volunteer with Drupal skills to work with OSUOSL to diagnose what is wrong and to restore stability to these services. Maybe some sight maintenance, upgrades or tuning is sufficient? I think this would be the ideal short-term solution at the very least. ==Option 2: Move Critical extensions to stable host== This is more a back up plan if nothing else works in the AOO 3.4 timeframe. There are a handful of critical extensions that many users will want access to, such as spell checking dictionaries. If OSUOSL is not stable when 3.4 is released, then we will have many thousands of very frustrated users. So with this option we copy the critical extensions to Apache-Extras and point 3.4 users to that. ==Option 3: Clone OSUOSL repositories to another host== In this option we rehost the existing repositories at another host. So similar to Option 1, we would need a volunteer with Drupal expertise. ==Option 4: Host repositories elsewhere, using new UI== SourceForge, etc. There are ways, for example, to create meta-communities ("Neighborhoods") at SourceForge across projects. Similar things can be done at Google Code or elsewhere. Take advantage of these forges rather than maintaining our own customized app. ==Option 5: Re-architect the Repositories== This is the option I personally favor for long term. The downside of what we have today is we have a single repository with a single host. This is non-optimal for several reasons. There are different needs out there if we look at downstream consumers and/or enterprise users. They may want to have a restricted or supplemental repository. I may want to make available to my users an interface that shows only non-proprietary extensions, plus non copyleft templates plus my own proprietary house templates. Someone else might want to restrict things differently. Look at analogous things with Ubuntu component repositories, with the ability to disable or enable proprietary drivers and/or non-supported components. In a new design we could start up front with a specification for a data model for an extension, something expressed in simple XML, with a query/fetch interface as a RESTful service. This would allow multiple repositories to look and behave identically from the data perspective. That then allows websites that aggregate such repository data, as well as in-app browsers for extensions and templates. Then you can imagine AOO allowing a user or admin to enable any from a list of several extension repositories to work with. The other thing this approach does is separate the extension metadata from the actual licensed extension. If we wanted to have a canonical repository of registered extensions, but without actually hosting or storing the extensions, then that should be OK. We're hosting URL's to resources. We're not distributing code. (There might be some hybrid way of doing this as well, by using SourceForge or similar for the underlying hosting, but then with tags or a common extension.xml in the root of each repository, then publishing data that we create our catalog from) > (Happy to do the migration too if that’s needed) > > Gav...
