Re: [tei-council] ODD question

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:54 PM, Martin Holmes wrote:

All of this seems to suggest to me that we really should be considering migrating to an install of Allura on tei-c.org. Everything Hugh and others find worrying about SourceForge's current state will eventually come to pass with GitHub too; site like this inevitably rise and fall over time.

This is not a valid reason to dismiss GitHub. It's true for everything, including the TEI and its servers. GitHub is incredibly usable and useful. It makes it simple to discuss tickets in the context of the code (unlike a mailing list), it's well integrated with other useful systems around the web, and some of us already use it daily and have other projects on it. I frankly don't understand this suspicion of GitHub that seems solely based on its popularity. We can only benefit from moving TEI development there.

The issue of svn versus git is completely separate from SF versus GitHub, and we could perfectly well choose to use either svn or git in an Allura instance. We already have an svn repo set up on tei-c.org for jTEI materials.

Stability and uptime become a serious concern when you're running your own servers, though.

Cheers, Martin

On 15-06-01 01:36 PM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

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On Jun 1, 2015, at 15:08 , Lou Burnard

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wrote:

On 01/06/15 17:37, Hugh Cayless wrote:

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Sourceforge is long in the tooth. I don’t know whether, for example, we can expect any substantial upgrades in the future.

Being long in the tooth is not necessarily a bad thing. The TEI for example dates from quite a while back. Also I cannot see any grounds for your assertion that there won't be "substantial upgrades" in the future. I seem to remember quite major changes occurring roughly every two or three years over the last decade. Not all of them to my taste but again the same could be said of the TEI!

The TEI has not rested on its laurels. It’s been continuously updated during that time. Sourceforge’s development has essentially been outsourced to the Apache Allura project. I’m not encouraged by the clunkiness of the interface (even after the switch to Allura) that it’s in great shape.

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At the very least, I think we need to have an exit strategy for

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SF. Even the rebuttal on HN points out that it’s a money-loser for its parent company.

We don't *need* an exit strategy for SF, any more than we need one for gitHub. We didn't have one for google code, but Mr Google gave us one anyway. No doubt if SF's owners suddenly decide that it's unable to continue for some reason, they too will propose one.

I can't help feeling that this github crusade is a bit of a side show. We do have quite a lot of more important things to be planning, which no-one else is going to help us with or determine.

Google is a bigger outfit and has policies for sunsetting projects. SF is owned by Dice.com http://dice.com/, best known for their jobs site and it is a cost center for them, therefore much less likely to get any love or attention. My worry is not so much that they may just turn the lights out one day, as that the site may gradually become unusable. I already see a lot more slowness and query timeouts than I used to. It’s starting to turn into a bad neighborhood. The Gimp certainly has a low opinion of it: http://www.gimp.org http://www.gimp.org/. I’m not arguing that it’s about to explode, but it’s clearly not on a sustainable path.

Relying on any third party entails some level of risk. I’m constitutionally disposed not to ignore risk. No crusading here.

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