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.