Since a few years, our website, www.claws-mail.org, has been hosted by the nice people of Develog. Our CVS and mailing-lists were hosted on dotsrc.org, another bunch of nice guys offering hosting to free software projects since years.
However, they’re starting to lack time and manpower to continue providing hosting — I guess they’re, like us, getting older and more and more busy with real life — and are in the process of shutting down hosting.
I’ve grabbed our multiple-year CVS history, and mailing-lists archives and subscribers lists from them, and after asking Yann, I’ve moved them on the same host as www.claws-mail.org.I’ve updated our CVS and Community pages to reflect the changes.
It should provide us with good quality hosting, and it also has the benefit of being free (as in beer) — thanks Yann ! Another advantage is that as Yann trusts me, I have a fair amount of control over the server, if needed.
It has only one drawback, as this server is Yann’s, and his job isn’t to provide free hosting to free software projects, that’ll add a bit of admin-load on my free time. But, mostly, it works and I won’t have a lot to do. I can also do-outsource backups, which makes me feel safer (for a little bit of time, I thought Dotsrc would leave us with no CVS history, which was a freaky thought).
Finally, I’ll be able to migrate us to Subversion or some other version-control software, if and when we agree on something, and I can get some time to do the migration and related (related is what takes some time, I’d have to change our tracker for something like Trac, change my buildbot scripts, fix the commit mail scripts, and other things I probably forget).
Hi Colin,
If I can be of any help for the process please let me know
For “some other version control software”, may I strongly suggest you investigate Git? I’ve been a Subversion user for years, and Git has made me a total believer. The learning curve is a little steep, and most people end up writing a few wrapper scripts to do the basic operations, but the ways in which it allows branches and rejoins and the conceptual simplicity once it finally clicks are awesome.
How about hosting at Sourceforge? They have integrated Trac, and AFAIK, the repository should allow multiple-vcs access. Either way, they have Trac+SVN at the very least, besides being well-established as a code hosting solution.
Google code is also an option, but I’d really go with Sourceforge.
Cheers
Ricardo: well, we moved away from Sourceforge for most of the stuff, because they’re just too damn unreliable. That may be just a bad-luck factor, but almost each time Paul Mangan prepares a release, there’s some sort of outage. So we only have the bandwidth-eating file downloads at sf.net.
Colin, I’m sorry to hear that SF was not that good after all. Still, they now have mercurial/git, which could alleviate this sort of problems maybe for good, while having their tools at hand. Having a constantly up-to-date Trac installation (SF staff) could still be a great bonus, if it turns out to be easy to have the repository in a distributed VCS working nicely—I myself am not too familiar with advanced mercurial/git distributed repos, though.
Dreamhost now offers Trac installation integrated with SVN, but still requires some reasonable amount of configuration. Even though they help a lot (which I’m very grateful), the process is tricky sometimes, and you end up investing a lot of time. I’d guess hosting with Google should be nice as long as no one bothers with the tools they offer.
Cheers
I’ve installed and been maintaining the trac and svn server our team uses at work, so if you need another hand count on me for helping with the transition.