SF is stopping Hosted Apps, what does it mean for OD?

[svenskmand]

So I received this email from SF about the retirement of the Hosted Apps services:

Last week we sent you email regarding the retirement of Hosted Apps on the
SourceForge website. We've received quite a few questions about this, so
we'd like to clarify a few points.

*What are Hosted Apps?*

SourceForge provides hosting for projects. This hosting includes a variety
of features, including download service, listing in our project directory,
web hosting service, and a specific application service we call "Hosted
Apps".

The Hosted Apps service consists of SourceForge-managed instances of:
Wordpress, Trac, phpBB, MediaWiki, Piwik, Dotproject, a URL shortener,
MantisBT, Gallery, IdeaTorrent, CodeStriker, TaskFreak!, phpWebSite, AN
Guestbook, LimeSurvey and Laconica.

*What is changing?*

We are preparing to discontinue the Hosted Apps service. We had originally
slated this to happen on September 1st. We are electing to delay this
service shutdown to later in 2012Q4.

No other portion of the SourceForge offering is being discontinued. We'll
continue hosting your project, providing SCM, downloads, project web,
mailing list, ticketing, forum, wiki, and directory listing services as we
do today. Only the Hosted Apps portion of our offering is being
discontinued.

Before shutdown, we are hoping for projects to deploy apps they wish to
keep to our project web service, which is not being shut down. To support
these migrations, we'll handle integration (package deployment), OpenID
(SourceForge accounts for auth), migration docs, and handoff backups for
all projects.

Work is in-progress on OpenID now (~July). We'll then assist with package
deployment and documentation to support migration of these applications to
the project web service (~August).

Pending completion of all necessary dependencies (~August/September), we
intend to provide a month for projects to complete their migrations. We'll
keep you posted on the exact timeline. If you have concerns at that point,
we'll provide you support in the process.

*How can I help?*

A list of the Hosted Apps enabled for your projects may be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/help/hostedapps/

1. Please check the above page. If you have apps that are not in use,
please disable them. Note that disabled apps cannot be re-enabled.

2. Keep an eye out for further timeline updates. Once migration
instructions, OpenID and all package dependencies are handled, we'll be in
touch.

3. Contribute to the migration documentation. If you have experience
deploying any of these applications in our Project web space, we'd
appreciate help with our documentation efforts.

The migration documents and timeline are maintained here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/communi ... etirement/

*I need more help!*

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us
at communityteam@sourceforge.net


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And my question is does this affect us and if so which services of the ones we use it affected and what do we do about it?

EDIT: After checking the link in the email it seems we use Piwik and Trac. Trac has our bugtracker, so that could be a problem, what do we use instead then? Piwik is web-analytic software, which I am not sure what we use for? Maybe it is just SF that uses it to show the webstats for downloads, website hits and the likes? What do we use instead if we need this statistics?

EDIT^2: Here are some instruction for migrating from Trac to Project Web (guide is work in progress) and for Piwik they recommend to use Google Analytics. See here.

[oln]

I have not used piwik either, so I don't know if it's worth migrating that.

We should probably try to migrate the bug tracker. (Or convert to using another tracker if that should be desired.) It seems the migration process is not quite finished yet though.

[StefanP.MUC]

I never really liked SF at all. What about migrating the whole thing, for example, to GitHub, Launchpad or something similar? They provide a more integral solution of code stuff (bugs, review, etc). GitHub also provides a wiki. Only thing it doesn't provide is a webspace, however....

[oln]

Sf actually does this as well now, with their new allura platform.

[StefanP.MUC]

Ah, nice. Just saw that it is Opt-In. Should we us it then? Then finally everything is managed by a single software and not clustered anymore.

[oln]

I think we should, hopefully it will be possible to import the tickets from trac. (We could update to allura anyhow of course.)

[svenskmand]

Allura looks pretty cool, but then should we then go all-in and also move the forums? If we do so what about users, will everybody from FGD move over, or will we lose some who just contributed to OD because they already had a profile at FGD?

And how much work will it be? We almost just finished making the website, will we have to redo most of that?

[StefanP.MUC]

As far as I understood the website and wiki will still exists, also with Allura. But we could migrate the wiki and trac (auto or manual? not sure) to Allura, which would make a lot of things very easy.

edit: Migrating seems possible: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/source ... cket/22477

[oln]

I think this is where it's done now:
https://sourceforge.net/p/upgrade/
Though, that doesn't involve migrating data from the hosted apps. I suppose we might as well update to the new interface anyhow while waiting for something to migrate the tickets. I'm not sure if we should change to using the allure wiki or not, what does people think?

[StefanP.MUC]

I'd say, switch to Allure wiki. The wiki only contains dev content, so it should be in the dev-part of OD. Then we don't have to care about updating and designing the wiki anymore and can concentrate on content.

[svenskmand]

Then we don't have to care about updating and designing the wiki anymore and can concentrate on content.

The wiki should of course be update for the developers, as it serves as documentation also.

[StefanP.MUC]

I meant the software of the wiki does not need to be updated and configured by us anymore.

[oln]

I would be okay with moving the wiki part as well, though unless it's possible to automate it I don't know if it will be worth the effort.

[svenskmand]

But they also use a mediawiki or what? In that case it should be easy to move it I guess?

[StefanP.MUC]

No, it's not MediaWiki. It's a part of Allura. And it uses Markdown sytax, what we can also use on our website CMS. This means porting of the wiki probably would be a manual task (or we have to find a syntax converter).

[svenskmand]

Ok, if we do it, then at least we will get the chance to clean it up anyways and add tickets for things that are missing, which might be a good idea

[StefanP.MUC]

Yes, I agree with that. This could now be a good point to clean everything up and begin to use these tools consequently, properly and at a central place.

[oln]

So we have to make a decision here soon, whether we migrate or drop the old bug tracker tickets. Seems like the project hasn't been auto-migrated yet.
EDIT:
Okay, not yet:
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/21313

[oln]

So the project finally got auto-upgraded.
Seems like the hosted apps have not been removed after all.

I don't know if everyone with access gets the mails from sf or not so in case you don't, the repository addresses have changed:
You can find them on the project page: http://sourceforge.net/p/opendungeons/svn/HEAD/tree/
How to change to the new address:
http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/Repository%20Upgrade%20FAQ/

[AlienWolf]

What was everyone's opinion on SF and alternatives?
If people are still interested in others then my top suggestions would be:
github - includes bug tracker, milestones, wiki, only git revision control
launchpad - includes bug tracker, milestones, wiki, various other things, only bazaar revision control (if you can tolerate the change )

[domtron]

I like Github alot and use it for some of my personal projects. They also give you nice statistics about a repository.

My old project used assembela for a while it uses the mercurial CVS, not sure about other stuff as we already had our own forum, wiki, and bug tracker before we switched.