[Sugar-devel] g.sl.o issues for Karma and perhaps other activities

[Bryan Berry]

I want to discuss some issues for managing Karma lessons on glso. Please let
it be clear that I am not criticizing the infrastructure team __at_all__. I
think they are doing a great job. The issues I am encountering have to do
with underlying tools and some issues specific to developers working in
countries w/ crappy bandwidth, such as Nepal.

Some of the main goals of the Karma Project are to get more developers in
general involved in creating content for Sugar and to make OLE Nepal's
content development more accessible and open to developers inside and
outside Nepal. We have a full-time team of 7 sw engineers, 3 graphic
designers, and 3 teachers working on content. It would be a crying shame if
we can't work with the larger community.

One big problem for devs here in Nepal is that international bandwidth is
both lousy and expensive. Conversely, w/in Kathmandu bandwidth is relatively
high-speed and cheap. I have up to 2 Mbps w/in Nepal but get around 30 kbps
for a site hosted outside Nepal.

The Karma repos are big and there will soon be many. The main Karma repo
will be 10-15 MB and each individual lesson will be in its own repo, usually
2-4 MB. I hope to have about 60 individual karma activities under source
control. That will be easily 200 MB. Transferring files of that size over
slow international links will really cramp our development cycle. At the
same time we need for the Karma lessons to be easily accessible
internationally.

A working solution will have to start with a server inside Nepal hosting the
Karma content. OLE Nepal can likely provide the server space. Would it be
possible for us to set up our own instance of gitorious? My impression is
that everyone is waiting to move to the gitorious instance but something is
holding it up. Even if g.sl.o migrates to
gitorious.org how difficult would it be to set up an instance in Nepal. Or
will it be too hard to set up a gitorious instance and we should just use
something simple for Karma like cgit?

So say we do set up an instance of gitorious here in Nepal. How could we
make it easy for others outside Nepal to access the code and contribute
back? If you are outside Nepal, downloading from a server in Nepal also
sucks due to the bandwidth issue. Would it be feasible to set up a read-only
mirror of Nepal's repositories on the Sugar infrastructure?

I would like there to be a writable set of repositories on an international
server but I can't imagine how the this mirror would sync w/ the Nepal
server without lots of nasty conflicts.

Sugaristas, please let me know what you think
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