Re: [Goanna-developers] Sourceforge or Origo?

[Till G. B. <til...@in...>]

Dear all -

as Origo matures, I am posting a follow-up on my question about the
possibility of moving Goanna to Origo.

Till G. Bay wrote:
> Eric Bezault wrote:
>> Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>>> I received a bounced message directed towards this list from 
>>> Till, saying that there was difficulty accessing the repo, and 
>>> asking if perhaps we should be using origo instead.
>>> 
>>> My thoughts on this:
>>> 
>>> 1) It might not be a bad idea. But what would the pros of using 
>>> origo be? An obvious con that occurs to me is that Origo is far 
>>> less well-known than Sourceforge. I don't suppose this really 
>>> matters though, if there are positive benefits from using origo.
>>> 
>>> 2) If there are identifiable benefits, and the concensus of the 
>>> active developers is to move, then the occaision should be used 
>>> to consider the structure of the software in Goanna, what should 
>>> be in, what shouldn't, what needs reviewing, what code is dead, 
>>> etc., and to plan an announcement for a 1.0 release.
>> For what it is worth, here are the reasons why I don't want to move
>>  the Gobo project to Origo:
>> 
>> *) if we want Eiffel to be better known, I think that it is better 
>> to be hosted with other non-Eiffel projects by well known host 
>> rather than having all Eiffel projects segregated into a ghetto. 
>> (The same applies to the choice of licenses by the way, EiffelForum
>>  license vs. MIT/BSD...)
> 
> That's true. If we want Origo to rock we will have to provide a way 
> to connect it to traffic bringing sources.


In the meantime we host more than 450 projects - mainly non Eiffel and
non ETH. So Origo can not really be considered an Eiffel or ETH ghetto
anymore.


>> *) What are the guarantees that Origo will still work when Till 
>> will leave ETH? Or if/when Bertrand will leave ETH for greener 
>> pasture?
> 
> If Origo is a success, I believe that the continued development will 
> be ensured. But at the moment it is too early to say if it will be 
> popular among developers. (it is with my students for now ;-) )

In the meantime we are working on long term ETH independent financing of
Origo. Furthermore I think we could give it a try to move the goanna
repository here and then move it back if really i should be considered
not good to have it hosted on Origo.

I see one argument for this:

It is a matter of a minute to make a svn dump and load that into another
svn server. So migrating the code to Origo or back to SF would be really
easy and we would not loose anything.

>> As you can see, these are only political reasons. I didn't study 
>> the technical merits of one host compare to the other. Another 
>> political reason that one might argue in favor of Origo is that it 
>> is written in Eiffel and therefore it is our interest to make it 
>> successful as a kind of killer application. Decisions are never 
>> easy to make!
> 
> It is indeed my hope to make Eiffel better known by showing Origo to 
> the world, but of course the traffic and popularity of sourceforge is
> beneficial as well. My message before was because I couldn't access
> the SVN repository on sourceforge anymore, but I then found out that
> they had changed URL's - so that is solved.

So to conclude I would like to ask you (the Goanna developers) again if
you could agree to hosting Goanna on Origo?

My main motivation is that I would like to improve the Goanna
documentation, but I can't really be bothered to edit the html pages of
the Goanna site on Sourceforge, but would rather have the wiki
functionality of Origo.

Thanks for your comments,

	Till

-- 
Till G. Bay
Software Engineering, ETH Zurich
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/people/bay