Re: [Koha-devel] [URGENT] Move away from Savannah/CVS

[MJ Ray]

"Joshua M. Ferraro" <address@hidden> wrote:
> This is the kind of email I hate to have to write. We're
> facing some urgency on a rather important issue: Savannah
> has been down for two days now, and we're going to have to
> make some quick decisions to avoid losing any more work
> time.

It's going to be back up today afternoon (EDT), according to reports
found via www.gnu.org (did no-one think to look there?)

> I caught paul/hdl this morning, and we feel a move to SVN
> with hosting from Google is the best solution:
> http://code.google.com/hosting/

Why?  From here, it looks like the best solutions are:
1. wait for Savannah to return, hopefully in a few hours as predicted;
2. host it ourselves from recent copies.

> Here are the likely questions, and our answers:
>
> Q: why SVN and not git, arch, etc.?
> A: while a distributed repository makes good sense in theory,
> we fear that it will be a barrier to entry for new library
> software developers and we'll end up spending a disproportionate
> amount of time teaching and managing version control

I think that is a weak reason.  SVN is different to CVS anyway, so
there's probably going to be time teaching and managing anyway.  At
least with git, the kernel hackers are famously intolerant of new
confusing things, so it's been pretty well documented in various
styles.

There's also a cvs pserver emulation now, written by two NZ-based
authors for the Open University UK, so the comments about losing
developers seems bogus: nobody would have to migrate until they were
ready!  I'd be happy to host that on one of our machines in London, or
elsewhere if you prefer.  Despite the insulting comment:

> [...] we're software developers, not proper sys admins [...]

I do currently work as a proper sysadmin (as much as a programmer,
most weeks) which is why I've not been that active on koha lately.

git is dead easy.  Really.  If you're going to do something dangerous,
you almost always can take a backup and put it back if you break
things (it's just a directory on disk in many ways).  Give it a go.

Also, if other koha developers had been using git and the
cvs-compatibility commands, we could all have been working through
this Savannah downtime.


> Q: why google instead of gna.org, etc.
> A: hosting at a project like gna.org, could result in the
> same situation we're in now in a few months. With Google,
> we get a Subversion implementation backed by Google's
> massively scalable, highly available storage technology,
> and some of the best sys admins in the world.

And backed by one of the least-loved corporations in the world today,
boycotted by a wide range of groups, from privacy campaigners, through
some private authors (after copyright problems), through to Students
for a Free Tibet.  I thought Google was even contraversial among
librarians (despite offering some good ideas that we should adopt),
but maybe I misunderstood.

I think that moving to Google would mean that we're very likely to be
in the same situation in a few months, when Google ceases the hosting
service, decides to start charging larger profitable projects, or puts
too many adverts on it.  I believe neutral non-commercial public
interest organisations like FSF will be more likely to sustain a
loss-making hosting service than large commercial public corporations
in the long term.

> Q: what about licensing?
> A: Google is acting as a code repository, they are not
> assuming copyright on the code, or changing the license.

I hope that everyone has seen on the news that Google has just been
accused of "rampant infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights" by Viacom.
If they are trying to trample a huge publisher like Viacom, why should
we think that the koha project's wishes would matter to them?

Excuse my wariness on this, but I've seen good hosting services go
strange in the past, changing project administrators and other tricks
themselves.  I've no idea whether Google would do that, but I also
can't see what we could do to them if they did.


Here are two other questions:

How would we get commit access without giving our personal data to
Google and/or opening a Googlemail account?

What about (current or future) developers from countries where Google
doesn't conduct business?


[...]
> I'd like to arrive at a concensus today about this issue
> if at all possible, so we can get back to work ...
> so please send your comments/suggestions/flames asap.

Sorry about the length of this email.  Even now, it probably doesn't
cover everything.  I tried to discuss this with Joshua on IRC, but he
refused.  I feel a bit annoyed that proposals like this come from IRC
without warning and then can't be discussed in real time there.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker,
developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w.
Workers co-op @ Weston-super-Mare, Somerset http://www.ttllp.co.uk/