Hello all from the JOS webmaster,
The JOS website has been pretty quiet lately as I've been very
busy with other work. So I thought it would be a good time to send
an email explaining what's been happening, and what's coming up
for the JOS website. I'm going to cover things in reverse
chronological order (future, present, past) since members that have
been keeping up to date probably can skip the past section
completely, skim the present section, and should read and
comment on the future proposal.
A future proposal: SourceForge
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JOS is a project that concentrates on building a Free Java Based
Operating System. As such, most of us aren't that interested in
building large amounts of web infrastructure to support this massive
project. To date, we have been hosting and maintaining our own
web resources (i.e. website, wiki, mailing lists, cvs, etc) with
varying degrees of success.
Enter www.sourceforge.net. This is a new, free website and
service hosted and sponsored by VALinux to support Open Source
projects of any kind. Please check it out.
SourceForge basically provides the following free:
Web page hosting
Secure CVS (with anonymous checkouts)
Message Boards
Mailing Lists (with message archiving)
Bug Tracking
Feature Request Tracking
Binary upload (to trusted members)/download (anonymous ftp)
Automated Surveys
The benefits of using SourceForge:
They have at least 2 full time developers working on SourceForge
Bugs are removed quickly
new features are constantly added
24/7 monitoring of the system
Automated backups
Much higher capacity to handle a "slashdot effect"
(something I expect to happen when we announce a beta
test kernel)
I can spend my time (as webmaster) on building and organizing
_content_ in our website rather than working on infrastructure.
Possible drawbacks
Loss of 100% control of our resources
We can always grab our data and move...
Loss of ability to gain revenue through advertizing on our website
We're not taking advantage of this now. When this becomes
a serious issue, we can move the site...
So I propose moving most of our current resources to SourceForge.
I'm envisioning a 3 phase website plane. The first phase is to move
most of our "common" website resources to SourceForge. The
second phase is to integrate our custom code (wiki and a rewritten
SourceServer) into SourceForge (either having SourceForge adopt
it as standard components for their overall site software or
integrating it just into "customized web" section of our
SourceForge area. Finally (and this phase may never come
about), clone SourceForge on our own machines and move our site
and all JOS related sites to a separate SourceForge site clone
(let's call it JOSSourceForge) so that we have one
JOSSourceForge for JOS projects (this would also allow us to gain
revenue from advertizing if we decide to go that route). Obviously
phase three is only if we get really ambitious and feel that the JOS
project needs that additional control.
For phase one, I propose moving everything except for wiki and the
disabled SourceServer to a SourceForge account. This would
include:
CVS (they just require a tar ball of the CVSROOT and they'll
install it into the custom SourceForge CVS).
Mailing Lists (I believe we can set it up to continue using the same
list email addresses)
Main Web Page (Host it at SourceForge but keep the www.jos.org
DNS entry and simply point it at the SourceForge hosted
page(s)
We also activate and use the new features the SourceForge offers
(i.e. bug tracking and message forums). We keep the wiki as a
standalone system (with its own unique user names and
passwords) until I can figure out a way to get it integrated into
SourceForge. This will have to wait on SourceForge giving us
access to their session management info which they say is
something they're working on.
In Phase two, I work on integrating the standalone wiki into the
SourceForge site (hopefully making it a standard part of
SourceForge). In addition, we add a rewritten SourceServer for
people that don't like to use CVS (which seems to be a lot of
people).
So comments please. Does this sound like a good idea?
Current Status
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I've finished a _beta_ version of the new jos wiki which is available
at
http://www.metamech.com/jos/
Please check it out. The site also includes a new, automated user
registration feature and gives our site the ability to track user
sessions (which should open the door to more advanced web
capabilities). This mimicks the session management that exists in
SourceForge, hopefully making it easy to integrate into
SourceForge in the future. So, if you want to test the new Wiki's
editing capabilities, first go to the "Account" area of the site, and
register yourself.
NOTE: Since this is a beta site, I expect to purge the user account
database and all wiki pages created in the test wiki before moving
our existing wiki pages into the new system. So don't put
documents in there you want to save. Also, please report bugs to
me ([EMAIL PROTECTED])! Hopefully we can get the problems
ironed out and move the old wiki pages into the new wiki system
asap.
A breif history
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This past year has been a bit chaotic for the JOS website. During
an update of the Wiki made this summer, features were added
(namely searching) that opened the Wiki to overload from spiders.
This resulted in us getting the Wiki kicked off our normal webserver
(understandably so). Since most of the web team was vacationing
out of town, this down time was longer than it should have been.
Most of the JOS project's web pages are in the Wiki and so,
getting access restored to those pages was critical. Our quick fix
was to move it to the first server we had access to that could
accomodate the Wiki software. This ended up being my server on
www.metamech.com. The relocation was intended to be very
temporary. That was the beginning of the fall (er, fall season, not
the fall of the website).
I began to try and address the problems in the Wiki by doing a
rewrite to eliminate the major problems. This was primarily
targetted at reducing server load by caching page renders (our wiki
currently "renders" each wiki page everytime its viewed), and
making wiki page searches easier. Due to time constraints, this
task took much longer than I expected.
-iain shigeoka (jos webmaster)
_______________________________________________
General maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://jos.org/mailman/listinfo/general
