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

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

Hi MJ,

First, I'll say, as always, I appreciate your perspective,
I think you do raise some good points. See responses below:

----- "MJ Ray" <address@hidden> wrote:
> "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?)
Two days of downtime on a project repository and host for the
primary download for the project's releases is, in my view,
an unacceptable service outage. The fact that they didn't
even bother to put a splash page up for savannah.nongnu.org,
giving a timeline for the outage, just aggravates the issue.
This isn't the first time we've had major problems with 
Savannah, remember when the mailing lists were taking 4 days
to deliver a mail?

The point is not that savannah will be up in a day or two,
but that we have no assurance that it won't just go down
for days again... in this case, the timing was particularly
bad as we'd planned to do some major work this week.

> > 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.
The comment was certainly not meant as an insult to you or anyone
else on koha-devel. It was specifically relevant to the current
project administrators, Chris, Paul and me.

> 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.
It's not that git, arch, etc., are hard to use ... it's the 
concept and management of a distributed version control system,
and the lack of a clear leader in this arena that leads me to
conclude that DVC is not quite there yet. We don't have much
bandwidth to devote to managing a version control system in this
community, I don't want to hop from DVC to DVC as I've seen so
many other projects do. Again, this is my opinion, I'm not speaking
for the Koha community or for Paul / Chris ... I'd love to hear
everyone else's thoughts on the matter.

> > 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.
I think this Savannah experience has alerted us to the need to make
sure we aren't putting 'all our eggs in one basket' with regards to
our project repository. I think establishing backup sites/ mirrors of
the repository should be high on the priority list for sometime in the
next few weeks (maybe ibiblio.org?). That said, Google has shown a
good faith effort to support the OSS community, most notably with their
Summer of Code project, and I've no reason to suspect they would
abandon their hosting project. Personally, I don't subscribe to the
'Google is a corporation and therefore evil' theory; in fact, I'll
go on the record as saying I think in many ways, Google's a great
example of how corporations should be run. They provide a useful
service to the world, they treat their employees right, and
they sponsor initiatives to foster education and advocacy.

> > 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.
I can appreciate the wariness; whatever decision we make, it's clear
we need to mirror the repository to ensure survival.

I'd like to hear more input from others, do MJ's concerns resonate?

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
address@hidden |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS