Hi folks,
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.
This also comes at a point in time when we've decided to
pick a new version control system to replace CVS.
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/
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
Q: why not host a SVN repo at koha.org or koha-fr.org?
A: we're software developers, not proper sys admins, and at
this point in our community development it's not fair to
place the burden of managing the repo on any one development
team.
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.
Q: what about licensing?
A: Google is acting as a code repository, they are not
assuming copyright on the code, or changing the license.
We're sticking with GPL version 2 or greater.
Any questions, see Google's Terms of Use:
http://code.google.com/tos.html
Q: What about losing all our version history?
A: A move to Google will mean we'll lose our version
history, that's true. Personally, I can't imagine
we'd want to roll back any of the code in either
rel_2_2, dev_week or head.
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.