Hi Peter,

There are free facilities that offer subversion repositories- http://www.subversionary.org/subversionary.cgi/HostingServices, many with packaged pm tools It is certainly true that sf is a dog, and its tools could use some improvements (it does use mailman for lists, but its bug tracking leaves something to be desired). I am not certain what we would gain by hosting these services ourselves.

I thought that keeping the agora in the same place as the core code makes sense. If/When mediawiki moves to an svn repo, then the agora can move with it. Subversion is catching on, but it still offer a barrier of entry to many developers. I would be happy to use it, but we really want to be as inclusive as possibly. But perhaps I underestimated peoples frustration w/ sf + cvs.

As far as a common hosting environment, thats a nice idea, but I don't know if it is necessary. The way that the collective works in the plone community, is that every mini-project claims its own directory within the cvs module. People respect this division, and don't modify each others directories without a courtesy email. The only thing this messes up is cvs notifications, since people rarely want to be notified activity across the entire module.

At that point, everyone is responsible for testing and developing their own extensions. Admitedly, it gets hard when it comes to releasing extensions. Reviews and rations are desirable, and one needs to consider the interactions between various extensions (they might not all be compatible with each other, or they're might be dependencies). Furthermore, some extensions may only work with certain versions of the core software. This can be handled at first with readmes and documentation within the individual directories, as well as on the Extensions wiki.

The directories will really serve as independent projects - its just that no one needs to go through the hassle of setting up a new repository to get their code under version control. And, if you are lucky, you may reap the traditional benefits of OSS development. The agora could become a means for gaining mindshare on interesting extensions, encouraging folks to use, debug, and contribute. Hopefully, situations like disappearing scripts and tools can be more easily avoided (provided the code is under an open license and resides in the repository).

I am also hopeful that Evan's hook infrastructure catches on and will lead to a more standard way of developing, configuring, and installing extensions that do more than define a new tag.

That said, if any individual agora developers want to share some resources, or even decide to use external tools for their particular project, they should feel free. Just note the links w/in a standard place in the directory (the README?). Some projects may be large enough to warrant their own mailing lists, others might just piggy back on this one (or the mediawiki-agora general one it gets any traction).

Does that jibe with what you had in mind?

nite /Jonah

----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Danenberg" pcd@wikitex.org To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:12 AM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] The mediawiki-agora

...

Thanks to Peter Danenberg for the nifty name.

A  thought  occurred to me, Jonah, as I was registering

wikiagora.org: I've just set up Subversion, Mailman and Bugzilla for wikitex.org, and have some spare capacity.

Would  it  make  sense to supplement SF with home-grown

facilities? We'll eventually need a testbed box, anyway; not to mention sysadmin's liberty.

-- Peter Danenberg . wikisophia.org ..: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l