fenics team mailing list archive

["Garth N. Wells" <gnw20@xxxxxxxxx>]

There has been some discussion on the dolfin-dev mailing list over the 
past few days on moving the FEniCS development repositories to a hosted 
service. The discussion has arisen in part due to the burden involved in 
maintaining the fenics.org server. With this message, I would like to 
kick-off a discussion and solicit opinions on moving the FEniCS 
development repositories to a hosted service.

We are already using a free hosted service (Launchpad) for bug tracking 
and feature planning for a number of FEniCS components and this has 
proved to be a success. The question which I wish to pose now is should 
we move all the FEniCS development repositories to a hosted service?

In terms of hosted services, the two most attractive options are 
Launchpad (https://launchpad.net) and Bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org). 
Versions of the DOLFIN repository are presently available on both

    https://code.launchpad.net/~fenics/dolfin/dev
    http://bitbucket.org/dolfin/dolfin/

Feel free to test them out. As mentioned above, we are already using 
Launchpad, and it provides some useful features like release planning 
and mailing lists. The drawback is that the version control system 
supported by Launchpad is Bazaar. Bazaar is very similar to Mercurial, 
but becoming familiar with it will require some effort. The advantage of 
Bitbucket is that it supports Mercurial repositories. However, it's bug 
tracking and feature planning tools are, in my opinion, not as good as 
those on Launchpad. Bitbucket does not provide mailing lists, so they 
would have to be hosted elsewhere.

I think that moving to a hosted service will provide us with development 
tools features and tools which are not and will not be provided on 
www.fenics.org. The www.fenics.org website would remain, and its purpose 
would be to present the FEniCS Project and its components. Only the 
development aspects would be moved to a hosted service.

Garth