Colin Alston wrote:
Charles McNulty wrote:
Jon Daley wrote:
I believe there have been a half dozen offers for hostingsubversion (myself included). Thomas or Charles wrote back to me and said thanks, but it wasn't needed, and that they expected to switch to SF's svn at some point. And since I now mirror the cvs tree in subversion for keeping my own local revisions merged, I offered to publicize that, but that was also turned down.
Well, wasn't me, so it must have been Thomas, but from my perspective I definitely prefer a hosting provider such as sourceforge as opposed to a volunteer no matter how dedicated or experienced they are. The advantages of sourceforge are that 1) They won't burn out from all the work associated with hosting 2) They won't decide to stop hosting over disagreement with the direction of the project or personality disagreements. 3) redundancy in terms of personel. In other words if the volunteer hosting the project is abducted by aliens, we'd be up the crick.
Now obviously sf.net has some serious problems. I don't know how a hardware problem could possibly in a million years lead to a month of downtime. And I can't imagine how sf.net imagines that this is acceptable. I'd be open to moving to something else like sf.net (perhaps savannah.org) or switching to svn, but there are too many potential pitfalls to handing off hosting to a volunteer, IMO.
While that is totally understandable, and I do agree, you should understand peoples frustrations since RoundCube is such a very promising project.
The only solution, although not in RC's favor, is that it is branched by someone who does have the capacity to provide reliable development services to people who are submitting patches or want access to bleeding edge code so as to make patches as well as have proper bug tracking.
SourceForge is great, but it leaves a lot to be desired and there are also many other tools which allow people to be more productive than the in-house SF systems.
If you're willing at all to hear peoples donations in terms of hosting and repo, perhaps it would be at least worthwhile for people to put their whole offer on the table.
Well, one option that is a great alternative to SF is OSUOSL. It's the Oregan State University Open Source Lab. Since RC is OSS, why not host it at OSL for free? phpBB just recently made the switch there :)
Now, they offer SVN (with anonymous access) and I can say that they're run from a University. So it's not just going to go away. Nor will any differences impact them in their decision to host. But, they do have requirements. Like they want to directly impact the OSU campus. While we can't do that right away, we could swing it to make it OSU's premier webmail system :) ;)
So check them out. I think it's a very viable alternative. If nothing else, the SVN repo can be stored there and the site elsewhere. It's something to think about. It wouldn't be immediate, you'd have to apply for space and such, but I can't see them turning us down other than for the fact that we don't directly impact the OSU community. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try!! :)
-- Brett Patterson Roundcube Forum Admin www.roundcubeforum.net