Questions about fedorahosted features and plans

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Jason Guiditta wrote:

> Hello, my group has been using fedorahosted for a couple projects for at least a year now, very happy that this service exists - and the folks in #fedora-admin are always
> friendly and helpful.  Given our use of this service, I was curious about a couple things.  First, obviously gitorious and github are the two main alternatives for (git)
> project hosting.  While github does not publish the source that powers their app, they do have a number of nice features and services, and I was wondering if there were any
> plans to try to replicate any of these things. 
>
> Some examples of what I mean include web hooks (http://help.github.com/testing-webhooks/), pre-rolled post-commit hooks (IRC, Jabber, Email, Trac, Campfire, etc.), gist (I
> know fedora has fpaste, but gist has permanent option, and it is version controlled as well), and general end-user-friendly things like a 'fork' button and useful docs/help
> (http://develop.github.com/ and http://help.github.com/ for example).
>
> Anyway, while it is not as open as fedorahosted, it does have a lot of nice features, just wondering if this was being looked at as possible things to reimplement or
> emulate on the fh side? 
>
> Related, kind of - is there a roadmap page on the wiki somewhere?  Also, are there any docs on what supported git hooks there are on fh?
>

We don't so much have a feature roadmap as 'plans'.  For example, we plan
on doing the standard upgrades when we can (we're a bit behind on that
right now from python conflicts).  We're looking to better automate
creation of projects.

As far as hooks, we generally allow any hooks that are brought to us.  We
have some standard ones available but people have written custom ones (or
had us download and install them).

As a side note.  We generally consider hosted a 'value add' for lack of a
better word.  We know there are other git hosting options available and
while we try to learn from them we don't really try to compete with them.
This is a conscious decision because while it's useful, hosted isn't
really the core of what Fedora is about so we try to keep it simple and
useful but not let it distract us from our core mission.

It's a tricky balance because we generally realize there is a lot of
potential in hosted, the problem is we already do a fairly moderate to
poor job of maintaining it (It's been maybe a year and a half since we've
wanted to upgrade to the latest trac and have been generally unable to for
a number of technical reasons).  It's had performance issues for months
that we've only been able to help but not fix.  Some projects and tickets
do sit for days or weeks on end.  We could have the entire team just
working on that, it'd be a world class hosting platform but everything
else would suffer as a result.

The other thing is, right now all of fedorahosted is provided by
serverbeach (Thanks serverbeach!)  That's going to have to change at some
point as we continue to grow but it all has to be taken into account.
Anywho, that's a taste of where we are today.

	-Mike