[savannah-help-public] Conceivable support for Allura?

[David Kastrup]

Hi,

the GNU LilyPond project is slated to move regarding its issue tracking
infrastructure since Google Code, which we have been using previously,
is closing down operations in late summer.

The current issue tracker is at
<URL:https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/list>.

Several project members have been looking at options which offer a
reasonable transition for our previous issue database and workflows.

As far as I understand, Savane is not currently a viable option for
several reasons.  I might not get all of them right but I'll try
sketching what was found problematic:

    a) much of our issue/patch handling is done by scripts making life
    easy for developers.  Savane apparently does not offer an API for
    script-based manipulation of its issues.
    b) since GNU LilyPond is a program for typesetting, a fundamental
    part of issue reports is the display of images with wrongly set
    material and scans from preexisting score fragments that LilyPond
    cannot reproduce usefully.  Also the regtest suite often turns up
    image differences for proposed patches that are then part of the
    review.
    <URL:http://sourceforge.net/p/testlily/tickets/4022/?page=0> shows a
    few images during the discussion.

Now the current shortterm migration that the developers aim for is to
Allura, the software that SourceForge is currently running on as it
seems rasonably close in features and look-and-feel and is running on
free software as opposed to GitHub.  Both an import to Allura running on
Sourceforge <URL:http://sourceforge.net/p/testlily/tickets> as well as
import in an Allura version installed on a personal computer have been
attempted.  The import scripts takes about 36h, the current database
about 150MB.

Now the question is whether supporting something like Allura on Savannah
could ever become an option or how we could otherwise reduce being
dependent on a number of different hosters with mixed priorities
regarding the willingness or ability to support large free software
projects.  The Git repository for LilyPond is already on Savannah.

Thanks for any thoughts about this

-- 
David Kastrup