[fab] Fedora Project and Hosting

[Warren Togami]

Mike McGrath wrote:
> So people have been asking more and more for general VCS space,
> sometimes SVN, GIT, CVS.  My question for the board:  Is the Fedora
> Project a place to host this stuff or should we just point them to
> freshmeat and sourceforge?  Here's an example thats comes up:
> 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/tickets/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=102 
> 
> 
> and another
> 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/tickets/customer.pl?Action=CustomerTicketZoom&TicketID=94 
> 
> 

We (infrastructure team) have rejected this latter case because the 
justification is weak and given our limited time and manpower resources 
we cannot handle such requests for the time being.

In the long run however, we do need some easy way for Fedora 
contributors to build and host projects.  Such a system must be 
automated in allowing users to create hosted projects using a self-serve 
interface.

Ubuntu's Launchpad is very powerful in its ability for anybody to create 
a hosted project with repositories and other services.  Even if the 
majority of sub-projects go nowhere, the flexibility and convenience 
does tend to allow projects to grow with close affiliations with the 
larger project.

I personally witnessed the community enabling power of Launchpad while 
at the LTSP hackfest during September.  During the course of the event, 
the Canonical engineer convinced LTSP upstream that they can better 
track their upstream source by maintaining it in bazaar repositories 
hosted by Launchpad.  In one afternoon, they were able to create the 
project and checkin repositories, without any bureaucratic hassles or 
delays.

The only real bad thing about Launchpad is that it itself is not FOSS. 
If Fedora creates an infrastructure to self-create projects and 
repositories like Launchpad, we would need to make it 100% FOSS.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com