Fedora Hosted Usability and Developer Experience

[Petr Hracek]

Hi Miro,

thanks for good mail.
I will try to explain some things regarding Developer Assistant.
Primary we want to implement just GitHub but we decided to implement 
OpenShift during the developing phase as well.
Current focus is mainly GitHub and OpenShift (in future).
More things have to be hardcoded and we have not enough resources for 
implementing another storages.

By the way is there any API for Fedora Hosted?

Best regards
Petr

On 05/31/2013 11:19 PM, Miro Hrončok wrote:
> Hi all,
> few days ago I was explaining to someone*, what the Developer 
> Assistant [0] is.
>
> When I said something like: "...and you project is exported directly 
> to GitHub [1] if you want", the person I was talking to interrupted me 
> and asked an interesting question:
>
> Why our own tools prefer a proprietary service, such as GitHub, over 
> our own infrastructure (Fedora Hosted.org)?
>
> The answer is very easy: Because developers prefer GitHub over Fedora 
> Hosted and we want to target on the majority.
>
> That leads us to other question: Why do developers prefer GitHub over 
> Fedora Hosted?
>
> Of course not each developer uses Fedora etc., but even many of our 
> own projects are usually hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket - see Developer 
> Assistant itself or Yumex as an example. Try to search Fedora on 
> GitHub [2].
>
> But other reason is, Fedora Hosted user/developer experience is way 
> worse than GitHub's. Even for a registration or a small change you 
> need to create a ticket, there is no interface for pull requests or 
> similar things (or not that I am aware of). Browsing the projects 
> (user friendly), whatever.
>
> I would like to change that and make Fedora Hosted infrastructure 
> something, that can compete GitHub. Or at least provide a service that 
> developers using Fedora would consider as a choice.
>
> What about running something as GitLab [3] or Gitorious [4] on Fedora 
> Hosted, add continuous integration for creating repos with nightly 
> RPMs, integrate it with FAS, brand it with Fedora graphics, add more 
> stuff and make it cool. Simply provide a truly open alternative for 
> developers that not only develop free software, but also are 
> interested in freedom and openness?
>
> Than we can provide our own service, that our tools can integrate with 
> as default. I don't except developers will leave GitHub and move to 
> Fedora Hosted, so there is nothing wrong on supporting GitHub in our 
> tools. But wouldn't it make more sense to promote our own services at 
> the first place? Why support a company that makes profit and is not 
> related to Fedora at all?
>
> Of course you can argue that Fedora's main goal is not to provide free 
> software hosting service, but then why we offer Fedora Hosted in the 
> first place, right?
>
> [0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DevelopersAssistant
> [1] 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DevelopersAssistant#GitHub_Integration
> [2] https://github.com/search?q=fedora
> [3] http://gitlab.org/
> [4] http://gitorious.org/
>
> * I haven't got time to ask for permission to publicly quote this 
> person about this on the list, but if you are the person and want the 
> attribution, feel free to say it :)
>


-- 
Best regards / S pozdravem
Petr Hracek