On 1/4/12 7:32 PM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 10:51 AM, Ross Gardler
<[email protected]> wrote:
<snip>
Once you've digested and debated the offer from Sourceforge the
community needs to come up with a couple of paragraphs indicating a
desired route forwards and reasons for it. I will try and attend the
appropriate board meeting in order to answer any questions that arise.
Maybe I'm the only dolt here, but one reason it is hard for me to make
a recommendation on a "desired route forward" is that I only have SF's
proposal in front of me. I don't have any proposal from Infra on what
they would like to do. Or did I miss it?
I agree with you that the proposed time frame (in two weeks) is too
fast for us to react. But I do think that we need a very solid and
capable extension and template repository before we release AOO 3.4.
I anticipate heavy traffic at that time. Since we're pushing for a Q1
release of 3.4, that means we will need to move quickly on stabilizing
these services.
It would be great to better understand where we might be with an Infra
effort in this same time frame.
Also, as I understand it, even with a short term stabilization effort
from Infra, we're still out-of-policy for graduation, and we'd need to
move to another solution after that. It sounds like the federated
approach where host only an index might work. I think I understand
what that effort would entail. Technically it can be clean and
elegant, but it does have a high coordination cost, dealing with all
of the extension and templates authors.
On the other hand, an external host, like SF, could get us the
stability we need, as well as deal with the OSS license compatibility
policy issues. We resolve it all at once.
I wonder whether one blended solution might be:
1) Accept SF's offer for the short term stability improvement and
getting in policy with the copyleft extensions.
2) In parallel work with Apache Infra, volunteers from this project,
and from SF (and maybe LibreOffice?), on an Apache Labs project to
build a simple open source template/extensions management server.
Maybe we can start from the existing server? (What license is it?)
Extend that to give the kind of loose coupling and federation we want.
When that is ready, the SF will be well positioned to host one of the
first servers of its kind. But we'll also be making this software
available to anyone to set up their own repository.
Important is the format the office requires and the office can handle an
update feed as well as a plain xml snippet describing the update info.
The current repo produce such an update feed.
But the backend producing such an update feed is independent. The
current repo is using Drupal and i think LibreOffice is using plone.
A good resource to get an impression of the feed and xml format is to
take a look on
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/ooo/trunk/main/desktop/test/deployment/update/...
I took a quick look on it and it seems that for tests we used files
available on http://extensions.openoffice.org/testarea/desktop/...
This files seems to be lost during the migration. I can't at least find
them.
See also
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/ooo/trunk/main/desktop/test/deployment/update/readme.txt?view=log
Juergen
-Rob
Please be imaginative in your planning for the future. The optimal
solution might be some combination of ASF and SF offerings.
Note Roberto Gallopini has joined this list and is ready to make any
clarifications necessary. I've also made Gav aware of this post so
that he can answer any questions we have about what infra@ are able to
do.
Thanks,
Ross
--- COPIED PROPOSAL ---
I'm glad we had a chance to talk last week - exciting times for Open
Office as the product and community transition into the ASF.
For over a decade, SourceForge has been committed to advancing the
open source software community. We host over 300,000 projects and are
visited by over 40 MM users per month for free, secure, and fast
downloads of open source software. Trusted and reliable download
delivery is an important part of our service, with over 4 million
downloads per day and 2 PB from our mirror network each month. We are
committed to helping OSS projects scale and grow.
Based on our discussions, we understand there are a few things you are
solving for as part of the Open Office Incubation effort:
Supporting a diverse licensing terms for Open Office extensions, that
may not all comply with the Apache OSS policy;
Stabilizing your Drupal OO Extensions site and ensuring high
availability and download bandwidth without cost
Expanding both the developer base who will move into working on the
Apache framework as well as adoption of the Open Office product and
extensions.
We think we can help and that there would be mutual benefit. To that
end, we propose the following for your consideration:
1.) Stabilize the your OO Extensions Drupal instance by moving the it
and all services to SourceForge. Our Site Operations team will do teh
work and oversee the operations for you as we do other services. To
your community the directory will look the same and extension and
template files will move to SourceForge's globally-distributed
download mirror network where we can ensure reliable, scalable
delivery. Drupal will be hosted on our project web service, serving
your existing domain via a VHOST. Standard infrastructure
(monitoring, backups, etc.) and service levels (99.9% availability
target) apply.
These SourceForge services will be provided gratis, and without
lock-in -- you are open to change your mind later. We anticipate this
migration would involve a week of planning and preparation, followed
by a week of migration and pre/post-migration communications. We're
prepared to commence this work the next week if provided your approval
and support.
2.) Once stabilized, we will work with you on a timeline to evaluate
and execute a migration from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7.
Allowing us to host the Extensions community will solve the license
challenges - or at least give you time to work through a longer term
solution. We would also be able to cross promote the software titles
to the development community as well - so perhaps expand not only your
user base but developers.
Roberto (our Sr. Director of Business Development) has been involved
in the OpenOffice.org community for many years -- he will continue to
be your point-of-contact. If we secure the go-ahead this week, we
will start on Tuesday next week and expect to be complete by 1/15 with
step 1. I have asked our head of Site Ops to oversee the
implementation and he'll partner up with your technical folks to
ensure the hosting transition goes well.
Our motivation here is quite simple, it is all part of our mission to
help Open Source Software initiatives succeed. To that end,
SourceForge and Geeknet Media are able to fund these services and make
them free to the community through advertising largely on the download
and directory pages. So there won't ever be a charge back to your
community and we are able to reinvest in R&D on our developer tools as
well.
We look forward to hearing back from you this week if possible. Feel
free to forward this on to whomever you would like in terms of getting
to an aligned decision.
I wish you a happy new year!
--
Thank you,
Jeff
--- End of copied text ---
--
Ross Gardler (@rgardler)
Programme Leader (Open Development)
OpenDirective http://opendirective.com
