[IAEP] Project hosting

[Bernie Innocenti]

Ivan Krstić wrote:
> On May 27, 2008, at 3:27 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> I think git project hosting might work this way: when you have
>> a prototype git tree for your project, you can make it available
>> somewhere or tar it up and send it to me along with your public
>> ssh keys and desired user name for your developer account.
> 
> Why the seemingly purposeless duplication of infrastructure which  
> outsiders are almost sure to find confusing? While OLPC's development  
> lists (in particular sugar@) serve their purpose, no new lists are  
> needed. While OLPC is providing adequate code hosting infrastructure,  
> no new hosting infrastructure is needed, and so on. Let's please start  
> offering sugarlabs.org code hosting when OLPC rejects a project and  
> not before that. Until then, mirroring will suffice.

WARNING: highly flammable material ahead!
WARNING: topics not usually discussed openly

You're technically right, but there's also a problem of project
branding and identity that we need to address.

Sugar wants to work with multiple OSes on the same level, hence
we cannot host Sugar development right on, say, launchpad.net
and require, say, all Debian developers to get an account there
if they want to contribute.

Similarly, I think we shouldn't have most of our development
infrastructure on dev.laptop.org if we want to invite developers
from other laptop companies and make them feel 100% comfortable
that they're not contributing to a project controlled by their
competitors.

There might be plenty of people who don't mind, but we know
by past experience that there are, indeed, a few who would be
disturbed and decline to work with us.  Let's learn our lessons
from (recent) history.

Moreover, our political situation is a little delicate right
now: we're aiming to gain the trust of entities which are direct
competitors in some markets, but we have a public track record
of being entirely hosted within OLPC, and we still have much of
our development infrastructure hosted on *.laptop.org alongside
the non-Sugar stuff.  The impression we give to outside observers
is that we're still some kind of subproject within OLPC.

A much better compromise, as proposed not long ago by Greg,
is using *unbranded* hosting on servers ran by our supporters,
including of course Red Hat and OLPC.

Without some research, you wouldn't suspect that

 - gcc.gnu.org is hosted in this way by Red Hat

 - *.gnome.org is co-hosted by both Red Hat and Canonical

 - *.kde.org is co-hosted by Trolltech, SuSE and the university
   of Kaiserslautern

 - kernel.org, NetBSD and OpenBSD are hosted in racks offered
   by ISC

Same story for Sugar Labs: we need and appreciate contributions
in infrastructure, and we'll acknowledge it in the usual ways,
such as a "hosted by..." logo.

That's the general picture as I see it.  For the specific case
of hosting git.sugarlabs.org (or dev.sugarlabs.org), I don't
see it as a big burden.  It's such a lightweight, low bandwidth
service that we could host it on any decent machine, provided
there's someone capable and willing to maintain it.  Perhaps
you know something about this job ;-)

-- 
   \___/  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  _| X |  Sugar Labs Team  - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
  \|_O_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"