[ZF] Proposal: Launchpad code hosting for ZF projects; free commercial support for migration

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

On 27 Feb 2009, at 22:39, Roger Ineichen wrote:
>>> I understand that Subversion is "good enough" for many people. But
>>> that doesn't mean we can't improve the situation ever. Andreas' and
>>> Roger's rejection of any new tool doesn't seem to be a well-founded
>>> argument to me. Like Leonardo said, if we had stuck with such
>>> arguments, we'd still be using CVS and the CMF Collector
>> today. Change
>>> isn't good or bad in itself, we just need to evaluate what we want
>>> from it.
>
> Since we switched to the launchpad bugtracker, I never used the
> bugtracker anymore. It was really a pain to use at the time we  
> switched
> and it wasn't compatible with the IE browser.

That's a pity, of course. Overall I think the move to the Launchpad  
bug tracker was a win, despite the overly complicated and often  
confusing UI. My favourite feature is that you *don't* have to use a  
browser anymore to interact with it. I do it mostly via email (which  
allows me not to get involved with the UI most of the time :)).

> But now, just looked at lauchnpad, it seems to look good now.
>
> I think our biggest problem in the zope community is that nobody  
> really
> have time for additional things. I see that there is progress with
> performance improvment and some dependency cleanup which is very good.
> But to switch to another versioning tool is just a nice to have thing
> and comes allways at the wrong time ;-)
>
> btw,
> I never saw a discussion about subversion and things we could not
> do with it.

Well, I think many people have moved on silently. I know some of the  
Plone folks use git (and git-svn). The people working with or for  
Canonical use bzr, obviously. Perhaps it never came up in discussion,  
but if you ask around, I suspect there are more people using DVCS than  
you'd think. Several people, including myself, have also blogged about  
these things.

> I don't belive this is a valid reason for switch to
> an exotic revision system which only a few projects use. We still
> need to stay with subversion for other open source projects.

I don't think bzr or any of the big three DVCS is "exotic". Bazaar  
might not be as popular as Git, but certainly Ubuntu, MySQL and Squid  
are big names in the open source world who use bzr. I was also  
positively surprised that it's popular in the scientific community.

> In my point of view the best tool will be used most at least since
> both of them are free. If someone could show me that bzr is getting
> more attraction then we probably should swith at the time subversion
> get not used aymore for new projects which was the case with CSV.

I think we're overrating the choice between the various DVCS. Like  
Tres said, we first should agree upon whether we'd like to switch to  
*a* DVCS. If so, we should ask ourselves whether we want to host on  
our own or not. Given that with DVCSs, a repository is only the  
canonical one if you say it is, I think this point is rather obsolete.  
Lastly, if we decide to consider third party hosting, we can consider  
Canonical's offer.