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

[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.