Re: SF Migration Update

Hi all,

It's been quite a while since my last progress update, mostly because 
the 2015 and 2016 have been very busy for me (I got my master's degree, 
bought a house, and got married within the course of 12 months.)  Things 
have since slowed down for me a little bit, and I'm finally able to 
dedicate a little more time to the Player project efforts.

I'm going to reply inline to note the progress on individual items:

On 06/27/2015 01:03 PM, Rich Mattes wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Quick progress report on the SF -> Github migration effort.
>
> The Player repository, as well as the Papers and Website repositories,
> have been exported from SVN and uploaded to github.  There is one snag -
> some of the email addresses in the author file were wrong when I
> exported the Player code, and I didn't catch it until after I pushed it
> to github.  Fixing that error means re-writing the git history and force
> pushing over top of the exisitng repository.  This is not great, but
> since the repository hasn't really been advertised yet I'm going to just
> push the fixed history and get it over with.  Any forked repositories
> and clones will have to fetch the new history and do similar.  I think
> there's only one fork at the moment (Kevin's) so the impact should be
> small.  If nobody has any issues with this, I'll do it this weekend.
>
This was done, and I've pushed a couple of updates to the github repo 
since.  The release-3-1-patches branch will be the staging ground for 
Player-3.1 release.

> I checked the bug and patch trackers on Sourceforge, and there aren't
> many open issues left for Player.  It looks like it's easy enough to
> import the issues to github[1].  I'll run the import script and then
> triage any remaining issues (there are a few that belong to Stage and
> Gazebo that won't make sense in the new Player-only tracker.)
>
After more thought, I think it's not really worth it to try to import 
all of the closed SourceForge issues to GitHub.  I made new issues for 
the couple that were open against Player.  I can make the ticket 
trackers read-only, and modify the main page to redirect people to github.

> I haven't made much headway on the site/documentation issues, other than
> learning how ReadTheDocs and sphinx work.  That means there's still a
> few ways the site could go:
> 1. host on github, combine site and wiki, re-write site using Jekyll
> (seems like a blog platform, maybe not a good fit)
> 2. host on github, combine site and wiki, re-write site using Doxygen or
> sphinx & import generated html
> 3. host on ReadTheDocs, combine site and wiki, re-write site using sphinx
> 4. host privately, keep site and wiki as-is
> 5. host privately, merge site into wiki, host wiki
> 6. host privately, re-write site/wiki however we want

I spent this morning working on this, and have managed to create a 
Jekyll site for github pages that can serve as the new project site. 
I'm still working on pulling in the content from the wiki and original site.

Check it out at https://playerproject.github.io/

I think it will be possible to update the SF site to redirect to the new 
github site, by adding redirect headers to the existing site's headers. 
I can probably add php to detect which page is being requested, and 
redirecting to the appropriate new page.

>
> I do like the idea of combining the site and the wiki, as I always felt
> having both was a bit redundant.  In the past I was starting to move the
> FAQ and tutorials from the static site to the wiki, so that there was
> less overlap and so they could be improved by anyone.  Unfortunately
> re-writing the site will complicate any redirecting from the SF hosting
> location.  I am leaning towards option 2, but would like to hear if
> anyone has any other opinions.

I'm going to try to move all of the general information about the 
project to the player project github site.  I'm thinking about using the 
github wiki for Player to put player-specific documentation 
(build/install instructions, etc.) and linking them from the main site. 
I'm also going to put the doxygen docs in the Player gh-pages branch, 
similar to rtv.github.io/stage.

>
> Mailing lists are tricky.  It's possible to export the mailing SF list
> history from mailman.  We could start a new pair of mailing lists at
> google groups, and there's a hacky way to import the existing history
> there[2].  If we go the self-hosting route, we could set up our own
> mailman instance and import the entire history.  I think google groups
> would be easiest.

No progress here - mailing lists are still on SF.

>
> So next steps are:
> - Push updated Player history with corrected email addresses
Check
> - Export SF bug tracker info, import issues to github
I'm going to manually copy any open bugs that are left, and close them 
on SF with a link to GH
> - Determine hosting solution for site and mailing list
>    - Import/Export mailing lists
No progress yet
>    - Merge site & wiki, host combined site
In progress
> - Announce migration and new site
Will do once I'm done importing content to the new website and wiki.

Rich


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