FreeOrion

Hi all, I'm a Python web dev who wasted far too many hours playing MoO 1 & 2 back in the day. I'd love to start contributing to FO but have a pretty steep learning curve (glad to see Python being used in a few places though).

One thing I'd love to help with is migrating away from SourceForge! Maybe I'm alone, but I find SF.net obnoxious to use, especially the bug tracker.

I can think of a few options that would be better, and I'd be willing to help migrate to any of them:

Google Code

Pros
Google Code is like sf.net done right. Its much faster to navigate. The tracker is a ton easier to use. The integrated wiki is decent, and administration is a breeze.

It uses subversion as well, so migration would be a breeze.

Cons

Migrating everything would be a pain (but thats where I can help!).

Google Code doesn't let you customize much. That doesn't matter too much right now, but down the road I'm sure you'd like a site custom tailored for FO.

Launchpad (bazaar), GitHub (git), or BitBucket (mercurial)

Pros
I personally use bzr & hg (mercurial) these days over svn, and I think they're pretty ideal for open source projects (makes contributing patches and branching for features so much easier).

Cons
While Launchpad has a great tracker, it has no wiki.

GitHub & BitBucket both have a wiki, but no tracker.

So none of these are a full fledged solution, but IMHO are all better than the similar services offered by sf.net.

Trac

I love Trac and use it for work everyday. It has the wiki, source browser, ticketing, and great roadmapping/milestone features. It supports all the major open source version control systems, so you could stay with subversion now and migrate to something else later.

The only downside is you have to host it yourself or beg free hosting from someone like WebFaction or myself. I think I have enough room on a server to sneak you on for free, but I might want to ask for donations or something down the road depending on how many resources FO takes up.

My Humble Opinion

Trac! And I'll help with the setup & migration. Its just really easy to use and beautifully integrated. The base theme is fine, but you can always customize it down the road.

At any rate, perhaps you guys love sf.net or at least have better things to do than re-invent the wheel. I won't be offended if you ignore me.

Thanks for all your hard work on FO!

Welcome

I'm not sure if any of are active coders are Python specialists. Here's a page of stuff that needs to be done.



I've used GNA, SF and GoogleCode, and i really don't have much preference, but i'm an art/design dev so it doesn't effect me too much. Did you notice, however that SF has a new tracker? I guess it's a beta or something you have to click to use the new interface.

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Thanks! I hope I can help.



I noticed, but I still find it by far the worst of any of the options. Gna seems slightly better. I guess its mostly a matter of personal preference though.

I used to use Bugzilla a lot but have found it unbearable since I started using Trac. Perhaps I just need to be more flexible.

The sourceforge web SVN browser is horridly slow (often taking a minute or so to load a page), and doesn't have online searching of the code, which could be useful. Although it's a bit clunky, I don't really mind the SF bug tracker, but I've never used anything better.

I don't know what we'd need a wiki for in our source hosting provider... We've already got a wiki as the main website at freeorion.org. Similarly, what do we need in "roadmapping/milestone" features that a simple wiki page (on our existing wiki) doesn't do?

There was some discussion amongst programmers recently about consolidating some of the FreeOrion mailing lists, hosted on sourceforge, which are mostly unused. (We probably only need one dev and one announce list). Doing this at the same time as changing source hosting might be easy. The destination host should ideally provide mailing list services, though.

However, I'm not keen on putting our source hosting on the (private?) website of someone who hasn't been involved with the project more than a week. With something like sourceforge or google code, it's reasonably safe to assume the provider will exist and still be providing hosting services a year or five years from now, or will at least give decent warning if they're going to go away. I'm sure your intentions are good, but I've had a few too many instances of "oh yes, I'll help..." that lead to nothing or a few posts over a week and then nothing to be comfortable putting our primary source hosting on your servers. Concerns about future resource use and "donations" to pay for it isn't very reassuring, either.

The nice thing about Trac is the roadmap is automatically generated for the most part based on tickets, so it takes some of the manual updating out of it.



Ah, wasn't even aware of the mailing list. Yeah, I think that shortens the alternatives to Google Code.



Agreed. Sounds like the Cons of switching are stacking up pretty quickly. I'll try to get over my hatred of SF.net's tracker.

I still think Trac would offer some nice benefits and could replace most of the features of SF.net and the current wiki, but things like the mailing list would be a pain to migrate and host (especially when SF.net does a decent job, and Google Groups is quite awesome imho). So if we leave it in place FO just ends up with more fragmentation among services.

The current solution does seem the most sustainable as well, at least until the FO Foundation gets off the ground.

My post wasn't arguing against change of source hosting in general... Most of the cons only apply to some of the options you listed.

I don't have problems using sf.net's bugtracker. But I must admit that I never used Google actively, so the technical apsects I am not aware of.

Personally, I don't like the idea to change to google, as I do not like google's policy to get control over everything that has something to do with electronics.

I don't know the other services either. And as Geoff mentioned, hosting our own project will need one person to be responsible for the server - and that is a single point of failure a project of FreeOrions size cannot affort.

SourceForge is currently testing new system. I found one bug - on default FreeOrion SF page it suggest to download FreeOrion in version 0.3.9. Removing FreeOrion cvs mailing list is also good idea.

Does this thread mean that I'm not the only person having errors while trying to checkout from SVN?

Where is that? If I go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeorion/ it has a link to v0.3.13 at the top right. The browse all download packages link also has v0.3.13 shown...

Now old SF system is back. Yesterday on SF was tested new SF system with 0.3.9 to download. Now it is right 0.3.13 to download. Apparently new SF system is buggy and was replaced with old system.

New SF with FreeOrion in version 0.3.9 is back again.

It's showing v0.3.13 for me...

I tried it from Windows and it is showing 0.3.13. But from Linux there is 0.3.9 as is shown in screenshot.

Confirmed... and strange. I don't know what we can do about this, unfortunately.