Open Source Project Infrastructure?

cpfeifer asks: "Russ Miles wrote about going through the pain of setting up his own infrastructure for his OSS project, AspectXML. He asks: 'Are there tools out there that make this process much easier, and perhaps ones that I could take advantage of by moving my own open source project to? Also what experiences have people had with the different community projects?' Should you start up your own gforge server, host it on Sourceforge, or perhaps look to one of the OSS groups like Apache, Codehaus or Tigris?"

Comments

In my experience

[The Clockwork Troll]

'Are there tools out there that make this process much easier?'

Sadly, in my experience, it's the tools on a project that make it more difficult.

What you need includes..

[mystran]

• version control system, CVS or Subversion is fine, but notice that having webaccess (viewcvs?) makes life much easier.
• mailing list, which is archived, maybe not publicly, but somewhere anyway, so you have a forum to talk in (and believe me, mailing list beats web-forums any day)
• bug database.. there are a few.. including bugzilla, but they all suck, including bugzilla.. fortunately, this may change soon.. (or might not) Anyway, the easier (faster to learn and use) your database to use, the better. Especially avoid excess byrocrazy.

What's great about sourceforge and the like, is that they provide you with all of those in one package, and the bug-management-thingies in the portals beat most alternatives any day.

If you want to setup your own tools, I think it's better to just run the set of services you need, and not bother with a full devel-site, since for one project such a site is going to be mostly bloat, but that naturally depends on the size of your project.

If you want to use one of the existing sites, then the criteria are either those of personal choice, political ones, or maybe a matter of convinience: many people already have accounts on SourceForge, some people on Savannah, and some (but probably fewer) on other sites. (This is only my intuition. There might just as well be sites with userbase much larger than that of Savannah).

Just my totally random .05 euro. Sorry, smaller coins aren't in use in Finland.

Don't Use SF

[Kick the Donkey]

I would recommend against using SF. The site is slow, and you'll spend more time learing the ins and outs of the administrative interface. I've never used GForge, but it looks to be more of the same.

Mabye use a groupware client (like phpgroupware).

Or better yet, use Mantis. Its a great web-based bug tracker. But we use it at work to track all kinds of things. All you're really looking for is something to manage bugs, enhancements, etc. Install it, CVS, and ViewCVS, and you should have almost everything you need.

Use the simplest tools that work.

[Godeke]

I have set up the following tools and had good luck for internal projects (assuming you want to use the LAMP model):

Mantis for the bug tracker. I use a downlevel, modified version (based on the 0.15.x version). Simple to use, which is the most important feature.
http://www.mantisbt.org/

PHPWiki for notes and design discussions. Very handy to be able to spell out the design of a module, get feedback and have history available (especially useful to prove who made the design change).
http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/

Finally a good discussion board. We used PHPBB fine, except the patch of the week that was required for security for a while...
http://www.phpbb.com/

I was originally worried about intregration, but it turned out that hyperlinks were sufficent to reference back and forth (for example, to reference a discussion in the BB from a bug).

Start with sourceforge

[scythian]

Not only will you get good tools, but most folks look there first. You can always move up to something custom, and SF will still link to your homepage, files, etc (AFAIK).
-Rob

Try the NetWinSite servers (DNews, DBabble, etc)

[joelparker]

From my experience running this kind of thing,
I highly recommend discussions via newsgroups.
They are easier to use than most web boards,
which leads to better/easier user feedback.

The newsgroups are easy to set up,
for examples see www.netwinsite.com.

The servers provide full text search,
straightforward email-to-news gateways,
various authentications, chat, etc.

Once you have your newsgroups working,
ask your participants what they use
for bug databases, source systems, etc.
Use the tools they know and recommend,
and you'll likely get better participation.