moving to the cloud for development

[mark]

Edit, read first: After a lot of looking and talking to damned_colonial, only Launchpad is under consideration now. But the rest of the entry is preserved for interested parties.

Now the question is, how big of a change is this for us, and does it provide enough positive benefit considering the interruption? I think it does, what do you think?

...

After OSCON, I'm considering hosting the Dreamwidth code on Launchpad or GitHub, which are both open source project hosting environments that give you a lot of really cool collaborative features and help to lower the barriers for people to get working on things. Plus, it makes it really easy to federate the code like we want people to be able to federate the site.

I'd love people to go take a look and comment with their thoughts:

Launchpad has a site tour: https://launchpad.net/+tour/index

GitHub has some 'what we offer' halfway down the front page: http://github.com/

Yes, both of these would require that we learn either Bazaar or Git (as opposed to the Mercurial we use right now). And we'd have to figure out how to setup changelog to work with it. But those are minor hurdles, if the advantages of being in a hosted environment like that are really worth it.

Comments

[yvi]

I'll check those out, but any particular reasons against using Google Code? I know a few people who use it and they love it. Does it not offer what you/we need?

[mark]

Yeah, Google Code is based on Subversion, which isn't a distributed versioning system. We made the decision to switch to distributed when we moved to Mercurial, and I want to keep that flexibility. (Both Bazaar and Git are DCVSs.)

The advantage to keeping the distributed system is that it really enables people to fork the code without having to invest a lot of time and effort. On both Launchpad and GitHub, anybody can just upload their own changes to the code, make a branch, without approval of the project maintainers.

That means that, if someone says they want to work on something, they can do so and put their code in front of the entire audience without having to go through any process. It makes things faster and easier for people who want to contribute.

[yvi]

Ah cool, thanks for the explanation.

*looks at launchpad*

[kareila]

FWIW Google Code claims to also support Mercurial, not just Subversion.

[damned_colonial]

Meh. I'm not a fan. GC is pretty bare-bones, I feel.

EDIT: to elaborate -- a) what Mark said about SVN, and b) I mostly know people using it for smaller projects, like single libraries or the like. I feel like it works better for that than for big hairy projects.

[damned_colonial]

I would be strongly in favour of this!

I have a slight preference for launchpad for no very clearly defined reason, other than that it comes out of the Ubuntu community which I think has a really good vibe. And "good vibe" is what I associate with DW, you know?

As an aside, I know you saw this post of mine about the gender of the default user icons used on launchpad and github, but it might be of interest to others reading here.

[mark]

Yeah, I stole the idea from your talk on Forking Encouraged. And it turns out I don't really like maintaining my own repositories anyway, it's kind of a pain. ;)

[foxfirefey]

I'm kind of interested in Launchpad's translation interface.

[superluminal]

are you intending to use launchpad's bug tracker, translation tool, support tools, etc?

i like github a bit better because it doesn't try to do everything. and there is bitbucket, a github-like service for hg. but neither of them are free software, which would probably be a problem for dw.

[mark]

The translation tool is interesting, but we don't use GNU GetText or whatever it is, so we'd have a lot of engineering to do before we can get to the point of using it. Outside of that, I don't know that we need a bug tool or such. The series/planning/management tools look interesting, but I'm not sure if we want them or not.

Mostly, I'm looking for the collaborative code/review stuff. Letting people fork, put their code up, and letting everybody see what's going on easily and quickly.

[sophie]

If you want, I could add a feature to the hack.dreamwidth.net site where you can click a link for each Dreamhack to see a diff, or I can add more stuff depending on what you want/need.

It seems to me it would make sense to have the Dreamhack service integrate in some way, though.

[kareila]

It looks like a long-term good thing, if it encourages the sort of collaboration we'd find useful. I'd suggest we wait until after site launch (that's only a couple of months, right?), to avoid slowing down the existing developers who are already trying to knock out bugs as fast as they can.

I've already invested a not-insignificant amount of time learning how Mercurial is different from CVS and I'm not thrilled at the thought of changing versioning systems again. If it's just the repository maintenance you find tedious, why not hand that off?

[mark]

I've already paid most of the cost of running our own: there isn't much left to pay (unless something goes horribly wrong, I suppose). It's definitely a lot of wasted effort on everybody's part if we switch to bzr or git, and that doesn't thrill me so much.

It's more about the positives I think we can get by using a collaborative service like this. I agree about post-launch, that's a good compromise between "get things done" and "get where we want to go."

[msilverstar]

I think it's a great idea, as long as you have off-cloud backups.

My friendly local programmers like GitHub a whole lot. But they're doing Ruby, and that seems to be especially compatible.

[exor674]

Well, I selfishly don't like the idea of switching to a different DVCS because I use Mercurial queues heavily in my development workflow, and I'm not sure if any other DVCS has anything as easy to use.

Personally, I've personally used both git and mercurial, and I like mercurial better for everything (no manually having to add changed files, etc...)

[pauamma]

The MQ support (or an equivalent) is what I'd be most concerned about too.

[foxfirefey]

I think this would be most useful for sister sites to run their own versions of DW and help cross pollination.