Re: New home for GPE?

Philippe De Swert schrieb:
> Hello all,
Hi!

> First of all we should be careful we don't move into some awful rethoric and
> flaming and take a sensible and adult approach to this.

Yes please.

>>> As for the "move", it looks more like a (hostile) takeover. I don't
>>> buy the "run by the community". I haven't found an "Impressum" on
>>> linuxtogo.org, but according to the whois DB it's run by 
>>> kernel concepts GbR, more specifically by you.
>> I am absolutely willing to explain this fact.
>> The reason for this is that someone has to pay for the server, right?
>> This does not fall of the stars or trees.
>> We tried hard to find sponsors for it but noone stepped forward without
>> seeing something. So we had to do it on our own. The best way, and most
>> cost effective, was to rent the server through our company. This does
>> not mean in any way that we own it, control it or whatever - please read
>> the explanation on LTG for that matter.
> 
> I guess this sufficiently describes the reasons why kernelconcepts registred
> for the server and my guess is that somebody else steps up for the hosting
> kernelconcepts would not mind handing it over.

Absolutely!
Paying a monthly fee for being able to do my spare time work is not
exactly what I like to do. But it has to be done, we do it right and
anyone else is welcome to help.
We also considered of founding a foundation for this but this is a
substantial hassle so we left that out for now. But maybe some day it
might become useful.

>> The formal imprint is still missing, yes. The reason for that is/was
>> that I am not sure what to write there. The platform and site is not, as
>> mentioned before, solely run by us. So we have to find a shared
>> liability model. But I think we will be forced to write a limited
>> imprint... but that is not for reasons that I would like.
> 
> Well it would maybe be useful to list the reasons why moving to linuxtogo is a
> good/bad idea and what are the advantages/disadvantages to staying on handhelds.

Good point!

> My view is:
> 
> Linuxtogo:
> 
> * more freedom to do what we want to do service-wise. (wiki, svn, ...)
> * removing the one point of contact bottleneck for all admin related stuff.
> (despite all George's efforts and willingness to work on this, it sometimes is
> limiting)
> * a chance to nicely re-organize all content, source, streamline the tools and
> develop a new working model to support GPE better in
> Familiar/Angström/OE/Fedora/Debian/Gentoo/whatever
> * more responsive versioning system (as handhelds cvs sometimes suffered of
> extreme slowness)

Yep.
Until now with the experiments we did at LTG it is (still) quite nicely
responsive and offers all everyone has asked for - until now. Maybe some
day when we have more funding from somewhere we can rent a second
server. Let's see.
The whole LTG thing is not fixed to anything. We, i.e. the community,
are free to move it (almost) anywhere we like.

> handhelds:
> * known location
> * no moving work (however reorganisation is still necessary)
> * known working methods (however they should be revised slightly)
> * lost of historic information

Right.

> moving risks/disadvantages:
> 
> * risk of splitting resources and people (no advantage of moving is worth this)
> * handhelds is a known location, it might take a while before people know that
> there has been a move

Well, that might be pretty quick. A slight twist in CVS could checkout a
new file with "big friendly letters" that announces the move, the
gpe.handhelds.org homepage could get an auto-forward and the
mailinglists are easy anyway.
Just that Google will need some time to catch up.

> * possible loss of project history.

Hopefully not. There are (Florian checked that) scripts to convert
especially CVS to SVN with keeping the history.

>>> As I'm moderately sure you'll do the "move" regardless of what I say,
>>> I'm going to stop wasting my time arguing against it now, but I do
>>> ask you to leave the applications I wrote (gpe-screenshot, gpe-life,
>>> gpe-mileage) where they are.
> Rene as you are the author of them I guess nobody will mind having you
> deciding on what happens with them. I would however encourage you to move them
> along with the main GPE tree if the move happens. 

Noone will force anyone.
It is a free choice. If hh.org still offers the service, the old CVS
tree will still be intact - but the new development would only take
place on the new (potentially SVN) tree.

> Furthermore IMHO it seems we should dicuss this a bit more before actually
> doing it. If we really want to go through with this we should make sure we can
> compromise with people who don't really like the moving idea. Splitting
> resources (which we can already ill-afford) is not an option for me. So I also
> support the suggestion of contacting a few more people and waiting a bit more
> before doing the move. Which also gives us the added bonus of being able to
> move everything in a planned and effective way (in case we still do it). 

Sure.
That opens up the need to compile a list of people we think should be
explcitely asked (if they don't talk here).

> Regards,
> Philippe
> PS: is the mention of GPE on linuxtogo under hosted projects not a bit pre-mature?

He ;)
That is a rather a test and some automatisms put it there. Florian
played a little with CVS, the tree and web page if we could actually
offer the same service at LTG. We wanted to do this to be sure before
suggesting a move. So this nothing serious and nothing to worry about.
It could be removed as easily as it happened to show up there.

> | Philippe De Swert       
Cheers
  nils faerber

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