Project hosting thoughts

[Jesse Keating]

Last night I decided I wanted more of a project presence for pungi than an hg 
web interface.  So I started exploring options.  108 was a disaster, I spent 
30 minutes trying to find where to start a project, only to find out that 
there is no way to find that out, you have to ask somebody and then get 
direct URLS that aren't linked anywhere.  Plus 108 doesn't support hg.  So I 
went looking to setup my own software, because damned if I'm going to use 
Sourceforge, or anything based on it.

Trac software has been around for a while, and I've stumbled across a few 
projects using it.  Reading up on their website http://trac.edgewall.org/ the 
trac feature list looked pretty neat.  More interestingly each project within 
a trac environment can have its own source control mechanism, and the have 
support for cvs, svn, hg, bzr, darcs, and an experimental git.  The git 
support isn't all that great, but really, what the SCM support does is just 
provide a web view of the files.  The more important thing is that you could 
get one of these source control repos at project creation time to do with as 
you see fit.

Other things I like about trac, the wiki component uses the same markup (or 
seems to thus far) as MoinMoin.  This will make it very easy to take content 
from a project and move it into the Fedora wiki should the need/desire arise.  
Also users wouldn't have to learn yet another markup language.  The ticketing 
system is pretty simple and easy to use, wiki markup language works here too 
should you want it.  Tickets can easily be set to block Milestones, and a 
Milestone view shows you the list of milestones and an easy view to see what 
tickets are blocking a milestone, or how many blockers have been fixed (and 
thus how close a milestone is to completion).  There is also a 'timeline' 
view that shows you a running history of project activity, such as wiki 
edits, ticket creation/resolution, scm checkins, etc... with rss capability.  
This would make it very easy to aggregate and track the progress of a 
project.

Some things that I'd like to see investigated:

  How decent is the support for multiple projects using one trac install?
 
  Can we use the Fedora account system as a web authentication (trac just uses 
web auth as far as I can tell)
  
  How easy is it to create a web 'project creation' page that would handle the 
initial setup of a project?

As a proof of concept, is there any way I can make use of a xen guest to setup 
a trac instance for pungi?  Some of the problems with using Trac would 
involve that it has to be installed on the same system as the SCM (at least 
for hg and git) or else regular syncs would have to be made with the actual 
scm location.  But honestly this might not be so bad to separate out 
our 'hosted' project SCMs from our Fedora SCMs.  Trac would run just fine on 
CentOS/RHEL4 but would also work on FC6 for a xen guest (much like 
CentOS/RHEL5)  If we do setup a xen guest with a public IP, can we also set 
it to something like 'hosted.fedoraproject.org' ?
  
-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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