[Bf-committers] introduction

[Michael McLay]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Nathan Letwory <
nathan at letworyinteractive.com> wrote:

> There has earlier been talk about why not use an existing hosting and
> project management solution, and from the discussions I have gathered
> that it is in the end much more desireable to be in complete control of
> everything, with the risk that some resources go "to waste" by
> maintaining those (I'd say they go to a good cause, but that depends on
> your vantage point).
>

Outsourcing verses in-house is a common business decision and the right
decision usually depends on the skill set of the organization. For instance,
the Python community has chosen to manage all of their resources. They have
a very large volunteer community with excellent experience to support this
work. The Python source repository was hosted on Sourceforge at one time,
but they left because of problems working with the Sourceforge team. They
always kept their mailing list on the Python.org server.

Currently there's an effort under way to upgrade our ancient gforge
> installation to the latest version. This has been impeded due to
> problems with the servers though, but once those are solved I think that
> we'll see at least an updated and upgraded gforge installation, which
> hopefully alleviates the most pressing problem: the trackers.
>

Having problems with a server is the flip side of having problems with a
hosting service. Also, the speed of the gforge tracker is horrible compared
with Launchpad. Will that be fixed by an upgrade?


> I guess we can have the discussion again after the integration (it's
> already in the pipeline, as said).
>

The last thing I want to do is start a long discussion on the mailing list.
Ideally a couple core team members would sign up for the blender repository
on Launchpad and take it for a test drive. If they like it then we could
continue the discussion about migrating. If they say no then the subject is
dropped.

About launchpad - I think I tried gaining maintainership of the Blender
> project there, but I have had no responses to my queries, so I lost
> interest in it (and after having used both Git and Bazaar I came to
> prefer Git after all, even though I was leaning towards Bazaar in the
> beginning) Anyway, as I already mentioned, I have a git repository
> mirrored on gitorious.org/blenderprojects, and can add users there that
> want write access to some repository, but not be in the so-called core
> team (people with write access to our svn repository).
>

Interesting. Maybe you asked before they had established a process for
determining when a maintainer needed to be replaced. It took less than a
week for me to take over as the maintainer.  As far as Git verse Bazaar, at
the end user level they are feature for feature almost interchangeable.
Since Bazaar transparently supports foreign branches it doesn't matter much
to me if Git is used, I will still check out branches into a local Bazaar
branch and work on them locally. I would assume the same would be true for
Git users.

I'm suggesting Bazaar because it is used in Launchpad and the great
financial and volunteer support for both Launchpad and Bazaar make them an
option that I believe would benefit the Blender community. I've done some
footwork on updating the blender project on Launchpad. I found the
management tools that are available on Launchpad are very powerful, easy to
use, and flexible. And, if something is missing, it is possible to write a
Python script to manipulate the project data remotely. Having worked on
projects hosted on Sourceforge and Trac I find Launchpad to be a very good
alternative.

Should the need arise for making tweaks to the content of the project on
launchpad there are many plugin tools available. If finer grain control is
needed the Python API for LaunchPad and Bazaar provide a mechanism for
controlling the content of the repository without the need to manage the
software and hardware infrastructure.