[Koha-devel] [URGENT] Move away from Savannah/CVS

[Dan Scott]

On 14/03/07, Joshua M. Ferraro <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> This is the kind of email I hate to have to write. We're
> facing some urgency on a rather important issue: Savannah
> has been down for two days now, and we're going to have to
> make some quick decisions to avoid losing any more work
> time.
>
> This also comes at a point in time when we've decided to
> pick a new version control system to replace CVS.
>
> I caught paul/hdl this morning, and we feel a move to SVN
> with hosting from Google is the best solution:
>
> http://code.google.com/hosting/
>
> Here are the likely questions, and our answers:
>
> Q: why SVN and not git, arch, etc.?
> A: while a distributed repository makes good sense in theory,
> we fear that it will be a barrier to entry for new library
> software developers and we'll end up spending a disproportionate
> amount of time teaching and managing version control
>
> Q: why not host a SVN repo at koha.org or koha-fr.org?
> A: we're software developers, not proper sys admins, and at
> this point in our community development it's not fair to
> place the burden of managing the repo on any one development
> team.
>
> Q: why google instead of gna.org, etc.
> A: hosting at a project like gna.org, could result in the
> same situation we're in now in a few months. With Google,
> we get a Subversion implementation backed by Google's
> massively scalable, highly available storage technology,
> and some of the best sys admins in the world.
>
> Q: what about licensing?
> A: Google is acting as a code repository, they are not
> assuming copyright on the code, or changing the license.
> We're sticking with GPL version 2 or greater.
>
> Any questions, see Google's Terms of Use:
>
> http://code.google.com/tos.html
>
> Q: What about losing all our version history?
> A: A move to Google will mean we'll lose our version
> history, that's true. Personally, I can't imagine
> we'd want to roll back any of the code in either
> rel_2_2, dev_week or head.
>
> I'd like to arrive at a concensus today about this issue
> if at all possible, so we can get back to work ...
> so please send your comments/suggestions/flames asap.

Just don't forget that code.google.com only offers 100MB of SVN
hosting per project. Probably not an issue with Koha, but I thought it
would be worth mentioning.

Dan Scott