Fedora Hosted Usability and Developer Experience

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 16:39:20 -0400
Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> 
> On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 6:45 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> 
> >
> > Actually I was going to ask the opposite question: Do we still need
> > FedoraHosted? It was created before there was GitHub or Gitorious
> > but frankly we are not funded or staffed to make it bigger and
> > better than it is now. The systems are 2 virtual machines with one
> > as primary and one as fallback. It is not a large set of systems
> > and is made on the backbone of compromises of "We won't use
> > FedoraHosted unless you support X VCS system"... none of the things
> > that Github or Gitorious or even Savannah has had to deal with :).
> >
> > Yeah. Unless Fedora is going to invest in FedoraHosted and make it a
> excellent platform for projects, there isn't really much need to keep
> it at this point.  There is no particular advantage to it over Google
> Code or sf.net or github.  The underlying platform being free
> software isn't enough of an distinction when using distributed vcs.

I actually disagree with that.

I think freedom of the service does matter. The debacles with google
reader and google talk recently should be pointing that up to all of
us. While DVCS do remove the possibility of our code getting locked up
somewhere it doesn't help us much if our entire workflow is locked up
there.

For example github's pull-request workflow is very nice for projects
with a wide contributor base but it is hard to move away from once you
are used to it.

When I looked at other options to github I was looking for a similar or
comparable workflow and I struggled to find any:

- gitorious merge-request is a extremely cumbersome currently
- gitlab has(had?) no such concept of public repositories so the idea
  of someone forking and contributing a patch was not even in the system

I think the folks running/writing github are good folks with the right
motivations but I've found that a lot of people with the right
motivations end up getting weird when money gets tight. It is best not
to be in a position where you have to find out about that.

So - freedom of infrastructure matters - if for no other reason than
making sure that anyone who wants to copy and walk away with their
code/issues/tickets/wiki can do so w/o needing to buy any software (or
worse yet software they CANNOT buy)

I agree with smooge that we're understaffed to make the service
everything it could be - but there are places we can be in between and
we've made changes recently to make it easier for us to try out
solutions w/o impacting every project.

-sv