mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2009-07-26 10:04 am
Entry tags:

moving to the cloud for development

Edit, read first: After a lot of looking and talking to [personal profile] 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 [site community profile] 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.
kareila: "Mom, I'm hungry." "Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday." (coding)

[personal profile] kareila 2009-07-26 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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?