User Project Tracking

[Lee Olayvar]

In response to a email i got earlier, i would like to get a bit of information on how you (Ian) see user projects tracking. Are we going to have a collective and Tortuga hosted/managed project tracking? (similar to drupal) Or is that too far down the road to bother thinking about, and for now its fine to use the VCS and Project Hosting of our choice?

I of course vote for Git or Bazaar (leaning towards Bazaar most of the time), which leaves Launchpad as a likely candidate. If Tortuga will indeed be the central hub in the future for user project hosting, but that will take a long time to implement, we could also simply make Google Code Hosting be a standard for user projects. This would at least give a more unified feel in the short term.

Thanks,
--
Lee Olayvar

[Ian Charnas]

We're going to use google code and svn. The user interface is
drop-dead easy, unlike Launchpad which had incredible feature
requirements, forcing them to make an incredibly complicated
interface. I want *REGULAR* people to be able to submit trouble
tickets, not just programmers familiar with DVCS systems.

Once there's a demo that regular folks can try, I'll put up a website
at tortuga.org (hopefully, I'm working on that)

ian

[Chris Perkins]

before you settle on googlecode, did you take a look at bitbucket?  Much more intuative than Launchpad, and uses mercurial.

cheers.
-chris

[Ian Charnas]

Yes I've seen it. They have some interesting features that google
code doesn't have, but the issue tracker isn't as easy, and you can't
highlight and copy code from the source browser or you get the line
numbers in your clipboard... and so on. I like google code better.

I do admit that logically I prefer a DVCS system, but until the tools
are easier than existing tools I don't want to switch. I can use any
tools, but we'll get more user contributions with easier tools.

ian

[Mark Ramm]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Chris Perkins <ch...@percious.com> wrote:

> before you settle on googlecode, did you take a look at bitbucket? Much
> more intuative than Launchpad, and uses mercurial.

Big fan of having mercurial repositories rather than SVN. It's
funny bzr has a slightly more intuitive command line interface than
hg, but Chris is right on about the bitbucket interface being easier
for newbies than launchpad.

--Mark

[Mark Ramm]

> I do admit that logically I prefer a DVCS system, but until the tools
> are easier than existing tools I don't want to switch. I can use any
> tools, but we'll get more user contributions with easier tools.

We could setup a Trac+mercurial solution like Alberto has over at
toscawidgets.org

I think we'd be willing to setup and host this alongside the TG stuff
if it's helpful.

[Chris Perkins]

+1 for this idea.  I dont know if my opinion counts,  but many many open source projects are moving to dvcs, and in my mind, the bigger the project the more sense dbcs makes.

Cheers.
chris

[Chris Perkins]

Oh, and btw I was able to copy from the source listing without copying the line numbers, its all about where you start your copying.  At least, this worked for me on Safari and firefox.

cheers.
chris

[Florent Aide]

I'm sure we (TG team) would be glad to host the infrastructure for the
trac + hg + whatever you need on our server (the new OVH private
server, not virtual, a real one with root access and all the fluff).
Alberto already expressed interest in being hosted on our server too
and I'm sure we have enough horse power for this :)

If you (tortuga coders, ie Ian) are interested please contact me in PV email.

Florent.

[Lee]

Well im not sure if this is my fault, or if it was going to happen no
matter what.

I just wanted to make it clear that i was talking about independant
user projects.. eg, if _i_ want to make a plugin for tortuga, where
would _i_ host it. Ofcourse this is up to me, but to keep everything
in one standard, i was curious where Ian would like this. Though, i
could be understanding this wrong aswell.. Ian, Do you want user
plugins (not in the core, or distributed with, tortuga in any way) to
be hosted in the same SVN repository as Tortuga? I'd assume not, given
that it could become huge and cluttered.. but i just want to
understand fully.

The reason i was asking where _i_ should host my plugins (those not
intended to be distributed with Tortuga) is simply because i am sure
we would want to keep as much of a standard as possible.

And just to toss this out there aswell, Bazaar comes with an SVN
plugin. bzr-svn. It actually downloads SVN just fine (i downloaded
Tortuga with it to test it). No idea how well it pushes/merges/etc
though. Also, i wasn't able to download just the latest SVN Revision
(a bug i assume), but that should be possible. Its actually what i
planned on using, hell or high water, if we are sticking with SVN.. i
just cant use anything but DVCS nowa days heh :).

On Nov 17, 12:38 pm, "Florent Aide" <florent.a...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Mark Ramm]

The way plone does it is that they have a plone collective svn
repository for all the plugins.

This actually seems to work out well, though I'm not sure what they do
for bug tracking...

--
Mark Ramm-Christensen
email: mark at compoundthinking dot com
blog: www.compoundthinking.com/blog

[Lee Olayvar]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Mark Ramm <mark.mch...@gmail.com> wrote:

The way plone does it is that they have a plone collective svn
repository for all the plugins.

Its a bummer there isn't a system more like drupal has (they built their own though, i believe). Allowing us to integrate all of these plugins (and core), to make it feel seemless between all plugins, but still have separation between each user plugin and the Tortuga Core.

I do think it is important that we think about where users will be putting their own self made plugins. The more unified we can make this, the better imo.. Rather than having every tom dick and harry choose to host it on 50 different places.. It would be rather a pain to browse them, not to mention you have reliability issues, etc.

--
Lee Olayvar

[Jorge Vargas]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 6:44 PM, Lee <leeol...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well im not sure if this is my fault, or if it was going to happen no
> matter what.
>
> I just wanted to make it clear that i was talking about independant
> user projects.. eg, if _i_ want to make a plugin for tortuga, where
> would _i_ host it. Ofcourse this is up to me, but to keep everything
> in one standard, i was curious where Ian would like this. Though, i
> could be understanding this wrong aswell.. Ian, Do you want user
> plugins (not in the core, or distributed with, tortuga in any way) to
> be hosted in the same SVN repository as Tortuga? I'd assume not, given
> that it could become huge and cluttered.. but i just want to
> understand fully.
>
> The reason i was asking where _i_ should host my plugins (those not
> intended to be distributed with Tortuga) is simply because i am sure
> we would want to keep as much of a standard as possible.
>

for that I believe the solution Alberto gave us for tw.org is the
best. the site is simply a set of trac's, mercurial repos, and several
other goodies, everyone is in the same place but projects are all
independent. Go take a look http://toscawidgets.org/ This site is in
the spirit of trac-hacks.org although it hosts both the core and the
plugins/extensions/etc.

[Lee Olayvar]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 2:37 AM, Jorge Vargas <jorge....@gmail.com> wrote:

for that I believe the solution Alberto gave us for tw.org is the
best. the site is simply a set of trac's, mercurial repos, and several
other goodies, everyone is in the same place but projects are all
independent. Go take a look http://toscawidgets.org/ This site is in
the spirit of trac-hacks.org although it hosts both the core and the
plugins/extensions/etc.

Keep in mind that i believe Ian is set on using Google Code. He has valid reasons for this.

Any idea if Google Code has a way (like launchpad) of sharing bug reports?

Eg:
A bug report can be submitted to a plugin project. This project is set to have a relation to Tortuga, so once the bug is looked at, and found to be a shared, or fully, Tortuga bug, the bug issue can then be shared between both projects?

(Heres an example via Launchpad News:
Because both Silva and Zope 3 use Launchpad to track their bugs, Launchpad treats that shared bug report as a single entity with the same bug number and a shared comment history. The bug report turns into a cross-project effort to find a fix for everyone, while both Silva and Zope 3 keep track of how the bug affects their projects through separate statuses, assignees and so on.)

Keep in mind if we can find a way to make Google Code usable, SVN isn't as much of a problem. Since you can still use SVN via Bazaar & BZR-SVN.

--
Lee Olayvar

[Lee Olayvar]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Ian Charnas <ian.c...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're going to use google code and svn.  The user interface is
drop-dead easy, unlike Launchpad which had incredible feature
requirements, forcing them to make an incredibly complicated
interface.  I want *REGULAR* people to be able to submit trouble
tickets, not just programmers familiar with DVCS systems.

Once there's a demo that regular folks can try, I'll put up a website
at tortuga.org (hopefully, I'm working on that)

ian

Also, for the record i dont feel Launchpad is that much worse than Google Issues. Im guessing its the duplicate report screen that may confuse some? Because its just a 2 step process. You enter a summary, go to the next page, and enter in information about the bug. The only real difference is that between the two pages Launchpad will search for duplicates and if found, display them to you given you a Radio Checkbox of them incase you want to submit ontop of one of those, though you can ofcourse still scroll down and submit the new bug report.

Was Launchpad's bug reporting system worst in the past? Or is this duplicate bug report the confusing part for users?

--
Lee Olayvar

[Mark Ramm]

> Was Launchpad's bug reporting system worst in the past? Or is this duplicate
> bug report the confusing part for users?

Launchpad was definitely more confusing in the past, and they've fixed
several usability issues, at least from what I recall. But I have not
used Launchpad very extensively in either form, so I'm not really
aware of the exact nature of what changed.

[Lee Olayvar]

Well overall i dont see it as that bad compared to Google Issues (im assuming it was in the past?)
The steps are about the same as google,

1.) Visit a project page, https://launchpad.net/mysql
2.) Click the big red "Report a Bug" icon. Which brings you to the report a bug page, https://launchpad.net/mysql/+filebug
3.) Enter a summary, click continue
4.) Enter the bug info (or select a duplicate) and click submit.

Im not trying to press the issue, but after relooking at the bug reporting system and realizing the differences are minimal (in my eyes), i am hoping the idea of Launchpad being harder is from an older version of launchpad? If its not i wont discuss this further heh.. But i am very curious.. clinging to hope we wont have to use SVN ;)

--
Lee Olayvar

[Ian Charnas]

Thanks everybody for this good discussion. I will take another look
at LaunchPad and BitBucket, and at the toscawidgets setup.

I haven't heard anyone suggest Google Code's interface is difficult,
so I assume that svn is the only holdup? I *really* like the google
code interface ;-). I'm willing to switch though, if there seems to
be consensus. I like bazaar enough to use it. I haven't tried
mercurial but I'll give it a run-through.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has working experience with
bzr-svn, I noticed they have a google code project so they can
specifically test to make sure bzr-svn works with google code. I
haven't used it, and I imagine they had to accept some tradeoffs to
make that happen.. but it's worth a look. Anyone have an opinion?
I'll probably be looking into that as well.

ian

[Jorge Vargas]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 1:34 AM, Ian Charnas <ian.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks everybody for this good discussion. I will take another look
> at LaunchPad and BitBucket, and at the toscawidgets setup.
>

great, please keep in mind they are a bit different both launchpad and
bitbucket are centered around the goal of handling one project. TW
setup is set to handle a "set of projects", which is why I compared it
to trachacks.org, so if the goal of tortuga is to be a "set of
projects" I believe TW is the way to go, in fact I have been working
on making it a lot easier to work with so we can transform it into a
tool for hosting, rather than the site for toscawidgets.org, my work
will eventually (I hope) be used to host turbogears.org.

> I haven't heard anyone suggest Google Code's interface is difficult,
> so I assume that svn is the only holdup? I *really* like the google
> code interface ;-). I'm willing to switch though, if there seems to
> be consensus. I like bazaar enough to use it. I haven't tried
> mercurial but I'll give it a run-through.
>

yes indeed, if they supported mercurial I'll run a lit of stuff in there.

> I'd be interested to hear if anyone has working experience with
> bzr-svn, I noticed they have a google code project so they can
> specifically test to make sure bzr-svn works with google code. I
> haven't used it, and I imagine they had to accept some tradeoffs to
> make that happen.. but it's worth a look. Anyone have an opinion?
> I'll probably be looking into that as well.

I don't know about that one, I do know about git and mercurial. git is
totally transparent, it's really optimal, but it's git. As for
mercurial it's a bit behind you need to maintain two local mercurial
repos to do it "right" and there is no such thing as hg-svn-commit,
although they are working on it.

[Jorge Vargas]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 6:09 AM, Jorge Vargas <jorge....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 1:34 AM, Ian Charnas <ian.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I haven't heard anyone suggest Google Code's interface is difficult,
>> so I assume that svn is the only holdup? I *really* like the google
>> code interface ;-). I'm willing to switch though, if there seems to
>> be consensus. I like bazaar enough to use it. I haven't tried
>> mercurial but I'll give it a run-through.
>>
> yes indeed, if they supported mercurial I'll run a lit of stuff in there.
>

a lot not a lit of stuff :)

[Lee Olayvar]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 11:34 PM, Ian Charnas <ian.c...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks everybody for this good discussion.  I will take another look
at LaunchPad and BitBucket, and at the toscawidgets setup.

Well i've never used it for this usage, but i do believe Launchpad has a means to relate projects to the point where bug reports and goals can propagate through multiple projects. So in terms of this, Tortuga would be the main project, with child projects being plugins, etc. But i have only read about this on the Launchpad news feed, and never implemented it myself, so i cannot attest to its style of multiple projects existing in a semi-seamless manner.
 

I haven't heard anyone suggest Google Code's interface is difficult,
so I assume that svn is the only holdup? I *really* like the google
code interface ;-).  I'm willing to switch though, if there seems to
be consensus.  I like bazaar enough to use it.  I haven't tried
mercurial but I'll give it a run-through.

I also really like Google Codes interface.. im a bit of a google junky anyway heh. I just really dislike SVN ;). Im still surprised they do not support a DVCS.
 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has working experience with
bzr-svn, I noticed they have a google code project so they can
specifically test to make sure bzr-svn works with google code.  I
haven't used it, and I imagine they had to accept some tradeoffs to
make that happen.. but it's worth a look.  Anyone have an opinion?
I'll probably be looking into that as well.

I actually used bzr-svn to download Tortuga (Since i do not like SVN heh). It worked good, but the default branching of an SVN will download the entire SVN history. There is a way to download the SVN and only the latest history, but i was unable to get it to work (a bug, i believe). I have not tried merging, pushing, etc, via bzr-svn.


--
Lee Olayvar

[Lee Olayvar]

So for the final decision we are waiting on Ian to choose correct? My preference is Launchpad/Bazaar (specially since its a big corp hosting it), but as long as we use a DVCS with quality and workflow (branchability) that is comparable to Bazaar or Git, then im happy.

--
Lee Olayvar

[Lee Olayvar]

Well i'm obviously for Bzr, and as a by-product of that i am for Launchpad. With that said, i figured i'd throw a bit of info for the two.

First off, bazaar has a bunch of bonuses, but so does mercurial, but just to get a bit of info about why you may choose Bzr over Hg, check out this comparison (biased towards Bzr):
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsHg
As a side note, im not sure how easy to use Hg is, but bzr is pretty easy. It focuses on being "Humane", so that would be a nice point for having less barriers between wanna-be supporters and the code.

Now for Launchpad, there are a few good cases which could be benificial to Tortuga and projects:

First off it is a good strong host, as with google code. It also now has an exposed API with a python library for this ( https://help.launchpad.net/API ). This could allow Tortuga to track versions, notify users of out of date plugins, etc. Ontop of that, we have the ability to group multiple projects together via a "Super Project", which is another thing we need. An example of this is the https://edge.launchpad.net/bazaar super-project. Under "projects" it lists all the plugins and related projects to Bazaar. Though, i do feel this needs improving, but the developers say UI and Speed are the next things coming down the pipe.

--
Lee Olayvar