Re: [rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
Am Freitag, 10. Oktober 2014, 20.38:30 schrieb Thomas Friedrichsmeier: Hi, Morning Thomas On Wednesday 08 October 2014 21:26:52 Mario Fux wrote: Sorry for the delay to answer this long email and with my answer it will become even longer but I hope it helps and otherwise just ask and CC: me for no problem. This is not something to be decided in an instant. Thanks for your answers so far, and for your offer to be our sponsor in the incubation process! In a very short summary, I think, KDE's main advantages are: - Complete hosting solution - More focussed community - Very low entry barrier for those already involved in KDE While on github's side we have: - Potentially lower entry barrier for those not yet involved in KDE Are you sure? I know that a lot of KDE projects get patches via ReviewBoard by people not yet having a KDE identity and developer account which seems to work quite well. - More flexibility at the cost of more fragmentation Not that I want to talk bad about github, I know it not that good but I just want to understand. What's the flexibility of github that KDE doesn't have? I continue to lean towards heading for KDE.org. (Plus, perhaps a semi-official repo-mirror on github as an outreach to their community?). Fans of github, speak up. Either way, I'd like to be aware of the main problems before we are half-way migrated. So I'll list the points that could be a problem on KDE.org (some already mentioned, and commented on, before). Not all of these are mission- critical to us, of course. @Mario, for those bits that you can't give a definite answer, what is the best place to ask? Technical stuff: 1) There are a couple of known areas, where we don't comply with KDE's code policy, yet. Most of that is fixable, and we are certainly willing to work on that (e.g. our plugins are not currently translatable). However, the project is quite large, and some of this may take time, esp. when porting to KF5 is also on the list. What is the expected time frame for taking care of such technical problems. And will this block us from claiming rkward.kde.org, making releases on download.kde.org, and using mailing lists? No, this won't block you. 2) Two other items on the code policy are a more fundamental problem to us. My worry here is not so much about uninformed commits to our repository, but it's quite important to know, will this non-compliance be tolerated, will it be a problem while under review. 2a) For one thing, we do have documentation in docbook format. However, the main in-app documentation is based on a custom XML specification. Essentially this is for consistency with the documentation format in our plugins (where using docbook would have too much of an overhead, and not allow certain features, such as dynamically filling in UI labels and info). 2b) A second thing is staying behind on new library features / continuing to use deprecated functions in KDE libraries. As explained, previously, this is because our user-base often has very old installations of KDE, but very new installations of R, and new versions of R often need new versions of RKWard. I don't think that you'll get a problem with KDE about this. E.g. for KF5 there is still kdelibs4support. I don't know what's the current plan for deprecating it (Kevin Krammer as the KF5 main guy might know). I think it's more likely that you get problems in and with distributions, if at all. Wiki: 3) The KDE wikis, yes I know the theory behind the division into three. But I've had trouble finding the info I needed, more than once, in big part due to this split-up. You're right. Theory and practice are not the same as usually ;-). For RKWard, a bunch of pages would fit into more than one category (several into all three), and I don't think that would really help. I'd like to keep the wiki in one place (on rkward.kde.org, once that is available). Would that be considered ok? For a decentral MediaWiki installation, could KDE.org accounts be used for login? KDE identify access works for all three wikis so it's possible. About the three wikis and an own for rkward that needs to be thought about. I think it's possible to have an own wiki but over time people will expect development stuff for rkward on Techbase and end user will of course search for end user documentation in Userbase.kde.org External ressources: 4) Some external ressources we might want to keep. The launchpad daily builds are useful in their own right, for instance, because they cover different series of Ubuntu (and different versions of KDE libraries, BTW). I'm not quite clear, what that means with respect to the manifesto's continuity requirements. I don't see that this shouldn't work. In fact KDE has quite a good relationship with Kubuntu and IIRC they migrated some of their wiki content to one (or more) of KDE's wikis. Donations: 5) We never raked in too much cash, but we are currently
Re: [rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
Hi, On Wednesday 08 October 2014 21:26:52 Mario Fux wrote: Sorry for the delay to answer this long email and with my answer it will become even longer but I hope it helps and otherwise just ask and CC: me for no problem. This is not something to be decided in an instant. Thanks for your answers so far, and for your offer to be our sponsor in the incubation process! In a very short summary, I think, KDE's main advantages are: - Complete hosting solution - More focussed community - Very low entry barrier for those already involved in KDE While on github's side we have: - Potentially lower entry barrier for those not yet involved in KDE - More flexibility at the cost of more fragmentation I continue to lean towards heading for KDE.org. (Plus, perhaps a semi-official repo-mirror on github as an outreach to their community?). Fans of github, speak up. Either way, I'd like to be aware of the main problems before we are half-way migrated. So I'll list the points that could be a problem on KDE.org (some already mentioned, and commented on, before). Not all of these are mission- critical to us, of course. @Mario, for those bits that you can't give a definite answer, what is the best place to ask? Technical stuff: 1) There are a couple of known areas, where we don't comply with KDE's code policy, yet. Most of that is fixable, and we are certainly willing to work on that (e.g. our plugins are not currently translatable). However, the project is quite large, and some of this may take time, esp. when porting to KF5 is also on the list. What is the expected time frame for taking care of such technical problems. And will this block us from claiming rkward.kde.org, making releases on download.kde.org, and using mailing lists? 2) Two other items on the code policy are a more fundamental problem to us. My worry here is not so much about uninformed commits to our repository, but it's quite important to know, will this non-compliance be tolerated, will it be a problem while under review. 2a) For one thing, we do have documentation in docbook format. However, the main in-app documentation is based on a custom XML specification. Essentially this is for consistency with the documentation format in our plugins (where using docbook would have too much of an overhead, and not allow certain features, such as dynamically filling in UI labels and info). 2b) A second thing is staying behind on new library features / continuing to use deprecated functions in KDE libraries. As explained, previously, this is because our user-base often has very old installations of KDE, but very new installations of R, and new versions of R often need new versions of RKWard. Wiki: 3) The KDE wikis, yes I know the theory behind the division into three. But I've had trouble finding the info I needed, more than once, in big part due to this split-up. For RKWard, a bunch of pages would fit into more than one category (several into all three), and I don't think that would really help. I'd like to keep the wiki in one place (on rkward.kde.org, once that is available). Would that be considered ok? For a decentral MediaWiki installation, could KDE.org accounts be used for login? External ressources: 4) Some external ressources we might want to keep. The launchpad daily builds are useful in their own right, for instance, because they cover different series of Ubuntu (and different versions of KDE libraries, BTW). I'm not quite clear, what that means with respect to the manifesto's continuity requirements. Donations: 5) We never raked in too much cash, but we are currently accepting donations via PayPal and flattr. I once got paid to develop a specific feature, and - without getting anywhere near concrete - we have considered trying our luck with a fundraising campaign to finance focussed development of certain features/tasks. What's KDE.org's take on individual projects looking for revenue? (I see amarok is selling T-shirts, digiKam is accepting donations) Timeline and Procedure: 6) I think in any case, the first step for us would be moving to a git repository on git.kde.org (ok, probably some sort of formal application, too; where?). Using downloads.kde.org wold have a rather high wanna-have rank, as downloads are one area where SF.net tries particularly hard to spoil their reputation. The target state would probably be having all our services currently hosted on SF migrated to their counterparts on KDE.org, and being accepted in extragear. But from KDE's point of view, which services will be available to us at what stage in the process, and can you give any estimates on the timeline? Regards Thomas signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports Are you Audit-Ready for
[rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
Hi! Recently, there has been more than one reason to be not-so-happy with our current project hosting (i.e. SourceForge.net). At the same time the git version control system gains more and more friends, and some people have suggested switching from SVN to git. Furthermore, KDE has become a much less monolithical environment (especially, but not only, in its new instantiation frameworks). All of these are good reasons to re-consider our hosting options. I think, the most obvious choices would be: - Staying on SF, and keeping everything as is - Staying on SF, but switching to a git repository - Moving project hosting to github.com - Advantage of having a rapidly growing community - Moving project hosting to kde.org - Advantage of being the community working on the same platform, and thus having the most obvious potential for synergies. Well, the point of this mail is not really to discuss the pros and cons of each of these options. That _is_ a discussion worth having, but right now, my goal is to explore what hosting requirements we have, and how we would go about migrating in order to ensure a mostly smooth transition. I'll let you know that I'm currently leaning towards kde.org, though. Please feel free to start a debate on this, esp. if you would favor another solution. -- So: What services do we use, and what should we keep in mind about each: 1. Version control: Our needs here are fairly straight-forward. However, some things to consider when migrating. - Links to SVN location are at a bunch of places: - Our wiki - MacPorts port file - Windows emerge build file - (Purely informational also in Debian/Ubuntu package) - Possibly other packages, we are not directly involved with - Some people build from SVN, regularly - Our Ubuntu daily builds on launchpad use a mirror of our SVN - Launchpad translations syncs the message template from our SVN Some of this may become obsolete when migrating (at least the launchpad translations, when migrating to kde.org). However, to ensure a somewhat smooth transition, we will probably have to make sure to keep our SVN at SF.net alive for quite a while, probably as a mirror of our primary VCS, then. 2. Wiki and Web: Our project web, i.e. the pages under http://rkward.sf.net mostly consist of a MediaWiki installation. I think that still makes a lot of sense, so we'll want to migrate that 1:1. Further we have a few plain HTML- files (importantly the building-plugins docu), and some PDFs. Also an apt- gettable repository of Debian packages. References to our project pages are all over the place, including compiled into RKWard itself. So we absolutely want to set up some sensible redirects, and these should be active for quite some time. 3. Bug and feature tracker: These are a custom brew by SF.net (Allura). I don't know, whether there is a smooth migration path to bugzilla, yet. If possible, we'd like to migrate both open and closed bugs. Even closed tickets are still valuable for later reference, at times. In this respect, there is a further problem to solve: A bunch of comments in the code, and commit messages references bug tickets. There should always be a way to resolve these to an existing URL (this needs not be a really user- friendly way, though). The location of our bug tracker compiled into RKWard is now an automatic redirect. However, non-redirecting links will be found in the wiki, and probably other places. 4. Mailing lists Anyone with experience in migrating mailing lists (mailman) to a new hostname? Links to the rkward-de...@sf.net list are all over the net, I'm afraid, and also compiled into RKWard. Thus the old address(es) should remain active for a fair amount of time to come (but could be forwarding to the new mailing lists). It would be nice to keep the archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/rkward-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/ functional. As with bug tickets, many code comments and commit messages contain references to mails. Links to mails in the archive will also be found in the wiki. 5. Forums The public forums were never too active. But they were used for discussing issues at times. Preserving those discussions for reference would be really nice, although this could be achieved with a simple HTML-mirror. A true import into another forum software is probably not necessary. 6. Downloads Obviously we need to offer file downloads. This includes some pretty large files, esp. for the bundled binary releases (~150MB for Windows, ~400MB for MAC, source bundles up to 800MB). We even have one file of 2.7GB for download, currently (Windows build environment). These will probably get smaller, but not small after porting to KF5 (aka KDE 5). -- Please fill in the bits I forgot. To sum it up, migrating to a new hosting is going to require a good deal of work. Some of you have been wondering, why I've taken a rather conservative stance on the
Re: [rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
I gotta say, git is reeeally easy to use on the Mac... -- Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports Are you Audit-Ready for PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance? Download White paper Comply to PCI DSS 3.0 Requirement 10 and 11.5 with EventLog Analyzer http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=154622311iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ RKWard-devel mailing list RKWard-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rkward-devel
Re: [rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
hi, Am Sonntag, 5. Oktober 2014, 09:27:57 schrieb Thomas Friedrichsmeier: That _is_ a discussion worth having, but right now, my goal is to explore what hosting requirements we have, and how we would go about migrating in order to ensure a mostly smooth transition. i'm glad this comes up :-) i don't know so much about the infrastructure of KDE, but having seen how smooth it is to host stuff on github, it sure is time to think about a migration, carefully. how about something along these lines: - we make RKWard 0.7.x the first KDE FW5 release branch - it starts with a new git repo, no matter where - RKWard 0.6.x remains as the KDE 4 branch, at least as long as 4.14 is commonly used; it will however only get bug fixes, development focusses on 0.7.x - it stays on sf.net SVN - later on, it can be moved to git as well, which shouldn't be so painful because there's no urgency as a side node: github has wikis for its projects, and kind-of offers downloadable binary files: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software but it's probably easier to host bundles somewhere else. viele grüße :: m.eik -- dipl. psych. meik michalke institut fur experimentelle psychologie abt. fur diagnostik und differentielle psychologie heinrich-heine-universitat d-40204 dusseldorf signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports Are you Audit-Ready for PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance? Download White paper Comply to PCI DSS 3.0 Requirement 10 and 11.5 with EventLog Analyzer http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=154622311iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ RKWard-devel mailing list RKWard-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rkward-devel
Re: [rkward-devel] Some thoughts on switching project hosting
Hi, putting Mario in CC, as he might be able to clear up some details, esp. with respect to what hosting on kde.org would mean. (Mario was in BCC in my first mail, as I wasn't sure, whether that email address was ok to use in public). On Sunday 05 October 2014 17:12:46 meik michalke wrote: Am Sonntag, 5. Oktober 2014, 09:27:57 schrieb Thomas Friedrichsmeier: That _is_ a discussion worth having, but right now, my goal is to explore what hosting requirements we have, and how we would go about migrating in order to ensure a mostly smooth transition. i'm glad this comes up :-) i don't know so much about the infrastructure of KDE, but having seen how smooth it is to host stuff on github, it sure is time to think about a migration, carefully. I think github and kde.org are probably not entirely mutually exclusive, although I'm not so keen on spreading the project across ever more service providers. But of course as git is a distributed VCS, boundaries are much less absolute in either direction. I don't know too much detail about KDE's offerings and requirements for projects, myself, but here's an initial list of pros and cons, based on my understand so far: Access control: - On KDE we won't have close control over who can commit - err push - and who can't. On the other hand, this might encourage contributions from the KDE community. Code policies: - On github.com we'd have all freedom. On KDE.org, applications are expected to comply with a few rules (https://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Application_Lifecycle). This could actually be a bit of a problem, as so far we have been deliberately _not_ following certain developments in order to keep backwards compatibility with earlier kdelibs releases as much as possible. @Mario: Background is that a good deal of our users is highly conservative about updating anything on their system _except_ jumping head-first to each new release of R. Problem is that fairly often, new release of R required changes on our side. So our latest code always had to be both forward compatible with the latest R, and backwards compatible with pretty dated kdelibs. Of course, when porting to KF5, we'll have to make a clean cut, anyway. However in the not too distant future, we may again want to stay behind on some changes in KDE. Exactly how much of the problem is that? Bug tracking: - On github, we'd have a separate tracker for ourselves. On kde.org we'd be yet another category inside a huge bugzilla. OTOH, this would make it much easier to forward kdelibs-/ktexteditor-related bugs, or even weed these out on submission (if they have been reported, before). - I don't think there are any fundamental differences regarding integration of bug tracking with wiki / commits / etc. Web hosting: - KDE.org offers projects subdomains of kde.org (@Mario: Only once accepted into extragear, or already in earlier phases?). AFAICS we'd have pretty much all the flexibility we'll ever need, there. Not sure on the maintainance burden, though. Github seems much more reduced in comparison. I think for the project's main user-facing landing page, github just isn't shiny enough. Downloads: - @Mario, how exactly are KDE extragear projects expected to distribute (binary) files? Are there any limits on what / how much can be offered for download? Wiki: - KDE has some central wikis (techbase, community, userbase), although the division between these has always been confusing to me. On github the wiki would remain separate. Probably we could host a custom wiki on rkward.kde.org, too. Translations: - KDE has a translations team, that hopefully will help us out. On github, we'd have to stick with a separate solution (currently translations.launchpad.org). Other tools: - KDE.org has reviewboard, which I like a lot. I don't have first hand experience with pull requests on github. Community: - On KDE.org there's definitely more hope that skilled folks will help us with certain tasks. If it's not coding or documentation, it might still be packaging. IMO, that's probably the biggest selling point for kde.org. The brand: - Regardless of how we feel about either brand, we're technically bound to KDE for good, anyway. What I think so far: - Hosting on KDE.org seems rather natural for a KDE project targetting end users. The biggest question is whether we can and want to follow all rules KDE.org expects from us. -- how about something along these lines: - we make RKWard 0.7.x the first KDE FW5 release branch - it starts with a new git repo, no matter where - RKWard 0.6.x remains as the KDE 4 branch, at least as long as 4.14 is commonly used; it will however only get bug fixes, development focusses on 0.7.x - it stays on sf.net SVN - later on, it can be moved to git as well, which shouldn't be so painful because there's no urgency Mostly agreed, except for developing one branch in SVN and the other in git. Cherry-picking commits
