Re: Project Infrastructure

[siko1056]

John W. Eaton wrote
> My best attempt to answer that 
> question is here: 
> 
>    http://wiki.octave.org/Project_Infrastructure

Thank you very much for this jwe, that is exactly what I was looking for! I
added some URLs to get the full picture without looking up oneself.


John W. Eaton wrote
>    * no one likes the savannah trackers but moving bug reports to 
> another system will be a lot of work 
> 
>    * we need a better way to handle patches that will allow more 
> detailed and transparent code review 

I agree, Savannah is free (libre), but hasn't been updated for about 10
years [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savane_(software)] but little patched
for security issues
[http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/savane-cleanup.git/log/] and I don't
see that this will change in a closer future. Compared to other free (beer)
project hosting sites [sourceforge, bitbucket, gitlab, github, ...] that
also encourage free software development, is simply not state of the art.
Actually everything can be hosted there
[https://bitbucket.org/mtmiller/octave/commits/all] (sorry Mike for
"stealing" your repo) and we can make use of "pull-request" instead of
Savannahs patch tracker and might become more responsive to user requests.

All we have to consider is to stay independent. Means, we should clone the
hg-repo to savannah and hg.octave.org, and should be able to export/save the
bug reports and pull requests, if the modern hosting service decides to
become less free or alike. Moving everything from Savannah is not required
from my point of view. We can simply make a cut, new issues are reported at
the new service and old ones are handled at Savannah.

But this discussion will come up at every OctConf and I agree to jwe, that
there are far lower hanging fruits to grab first.


Olaf Till-2 wrote
> 
> John W. Eaton wrote
>>    * it's confusing to have our infrastructure spread over so many
>> different systems
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> It's not only about where it is hosted, or whether they are hosted and
>> developed together, but about whether having what appears to be a single
>> web
>> site will provide a better experience for users.  People used to be
>> constantly confused by having both Octave and Octave Forge projects. Were
>> they the same?  Different?  Was Octave Forge a different version of
>> Octave?
>> Why aren't the Octave sources on Octave Forge?  Why can't I find packages
>> on
>> the Octave site.  Etc.
>>  
>> For the users, I think it would be good if we had a single web site,
>> where
>> everything appears under the same domain name.
> 
> Mike Miller wrote
>> Maybe, maybe not. I haven't been following closely, but the Forge 
>> project is working through its own reorganization. It may end up being 
>> more than one collection of packages, and some package maintainers may 
>> want to be more closely affiliated with Octave than others, some may 
>> value autonomy and differentiation more than others. 
>> 
>> I think it might be advantageous to users to have a unified web 
>> interface for Octave and packages, but that doesn't necessarily mean 
>> unified hosting, either for docs or code or both.
> I can't imagine that the domain name alone will be decisive. It is
> common that sites have different domain names for different tasks.
> 
> I think what you actually propose is dropping the web identity 'Octave
> Forge'? -- Pracically meaning, among others, that its home page would
> disappear, and only some of its subpages would survive in a changed
> form, being linked to directly from the Octave homepage or a
> 'packages' subpage?
> 
> Olaf

I think Octave forge should remain an entity, especially now, as there
happened such a great change in it's administration.

The point is, we're wasting a lot of energy in duplicating effort. There is
a wiki, there is a static website, and there is an Octave forge website, all
with a different layout and web-address. As a new user it took me some time
to see through all of this. All of them have great features (wiki is
dynamic), forge has a great function reference
(https://octave.sourceforge.io/docs.php why should this feature not be
available to a "standard" Octave user, not knowing about Octave forge and
only the manual
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Function-Index.html?). 

I would come to the conclusion, that octave.org should be only more or less
a landing page, redirecting to all of the great efforts of the Octave
project, like currently the wiki does (but I find it too overloaded). Most
of the octave.org subpages would perfectly fit into the wiki, if it was
possible to restrict writing to them to certain admins only.

Kai.



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