Life & hacking

Today I want to start contributing to a solution for something that has been agitating me for a while. That is, simply not enough people know who wicked-cool hosting your project on gnome.org is.

As many other people probably, I started hosting projects on sourceforge.net years ago. Over time, their infrastructure became limited. In between I used garage.maemo.org for some stuff which is nice but also limited in some way for bigger projects.

In the end, all the stuff I work on and that I maintain is hosted on gnome.org. While I never worked on any part of that infrastructure and I have high respect for all the sysadmins donating their time to such a great platform I still think we need to do better promotion for it.

Just enough goodness for my project

The gnome infrastructure is the perfect place for my projects because it gives you all the benefits of project hosting without limiting you to a specific development model. And in addition it is a great place to collaborate with other great GNOME projects.

In particular it features great solutions for the following things:

• Bug Tracking: The best bugzilla I have seen around with an awesome bugsquad taking care of all the incomplete and strange bugreports
• Code Hosting: Store your code in the git version control system and keep track of the status with the cgit web interface
• Translations: Huge number of translation teams that provide high-quality translations and damned-lies as great tool to track translation status, submit and review translations
• Mailing lists: Provides a high quality mailman interface for your mailing list including with archive and bonus features like registering your mail as post-only for all gnome lists which gives great convenience.
• Web space: Give your project a home on the web which unlimited space and fast servers.
• Wiki: Nice, easy to use and translatable space for keeping some non-code stuff for your project

All of the major and successful GNOME projects use that infrastructure regardless if driven by companies, groups or individuals.

See the list of Why gnome.org Rocks articles here.

(You might have noticed that this series looks a lot like Jono’s series on Launchpad. That’s intentional! But that doesn’t mean that I want to start a flamewar on project hosting. I just have the feeling that people don’t really understand how good our infrastructure is and I really want to change that.)