Sourceforge (was [m-dev.] for review: minutes 5/1/2001)

[Tyson Dowd]

On 06-Jan-2001, Mark Anthony BROWN <dougl at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> +2. Mercury on SourceForge.
> +
> +	Peter Ross has given some feedback on accessing the Mercury site
> +	from outside Australia---it can be fairly bad.  One solution that
> +	has been suggested is to place some of the Mercury material on
> +	<a href="http://sourceforge.net/">SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/)</a>, which provides a range of
> +	services to support developers of Open Source projects.
> +
> +	We discussed which services we are most interested in putting to use.
> +	These include:
> +
> +		- mailing lists
> +		- web page hosting
> +		- bug tracking
> +		- task management.
> +
> +	We are not, however, considering moving our CVS repository to
> +	SourceForge.  We would want to do regular uploads of the release of
> +	the day, but daily uploads are likely to get expensive so it was
> +	suggested that weekly uploads would be better.
> +
> +	Further discussion is deferred until more developers have had a look
> +	at what SourceForge has (or hasn't) to offer.

It's not just that from outside Australia access is bad, it's also that bug
tracking and task management (e.g. for the release) is currently done in
a very ad-hoc, non-transparent manner. 

To get an idea of what is available, here are some links to
some active projects:


Bug Tracking:
	http://sourceforge.net/patch/?group_id=5470

Task Manager:
	http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?group_id=5470&set=custom&group_project_id=4564&_assigned_to=0&_status=100&SUBMIT=Browse

These two seem to be pretty reasonable systems.


Documentation manager:
	http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=1

This could possibly do a better job than FAQ-o-matic.


File manager:
	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1
	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1126
		(the second one is for Mercury)

This is nice for big downloadables.  We've had 239 downloads from our
file list, without doing any linking to it whatsoever.


Other things that might be of interest:

Patch management:
	http://sourceforge.net/patch/?group_id=1

Tech Support:
	http://sourceforge.net/support/?group_id=1

News manager:
	http://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=1

	Pretty similar to our news file -- not sure if it is worth
	using.

You can turn off things that you are not using.


See 
	http://mercury.sourceforge.net/

for a version of the Mercury homepage that runs (mostly) on sourceforge.
There are some links back to our CS homepage, and a few links that are
broken.

Mailing lists are done through GeoCrawler, for instance:
	http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/680/2000/12/0/

I'm not sure whether this is any better than what we have, but you have
to consider that Pete and I have in combination spent *many* hours
maintaining what we have (not to mention Fergus handling the problems we
have had with the departments mail configuration).  Also, many mailing
lists are now moving to GNU MailMan, it seems to offer better features
and is well maintained.  

Even if this system is wonderful and hassle-free, getting the archives
into this system is the big problem.


Finally, consider also that we could also split off sub-projects fairly
easily using this system (e.g. MCORBA, the extras).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/quicksilver/

is being used to handle the webserver written in Mercury (called
Quicksilver).

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't everyone's cup of fur.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #
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