Fedora Hosted Usability and Developer Experience

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, 31 May 2013 23:19:50 +0200
Miro Hrončok <mhroncok at redhat.com> 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].

Sure, and others are on savannah, or sourceforge or their own
infrastructure. The net is a big place. ;) 
 
> 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, 

Indeed. I've been making sure all hosted tickets are done in under 4
hours (and often in minutes), but I agree it can be a turn off. 

> 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] 

Please see the many posts on gitlab on the fedora infrastructure
list. ;) 

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/infrastructure/2013-April/thread.html
and search for 'gitlab' ;) 

a) It's not (yet) packaged, although I think some GSoC folks are
working on it. 

b) Until very recently upstream was very much oriented toward a private
company setup. They refused patches to provide anon browsing and using
of gitlab features. Happily it looks like this is changing, but as it
is now, gitlab does not provide a 'open github' type thing. :) 

> or Gitorious [4] on Fedora 

Gitorious lacks many of the features you mention as compelling in
github above. ;) Also not packaged. 

Both of those also don't provide some features people want. (release
downloads, non git scms, fedmsg integration, management of groups via
fas, etc). 

> 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?

I'm not against such a plan at all, but it has to be done in a
sustainable way, and I don't think we have manpower to do anything like
this of current folks. If a team of people interested in doing this
(and doing it right) appeared, I'd be happy to help. 

We have a more modest ideas page for a v2 fedorahosted: 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_FedoraHosted_Version2_Notes
Probibly needs some updating for current status, etc. 

> 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?

Sure, but there's only 24 hours in a day. ;) 

kevin
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