fenics team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear FEniCS users and developers,

A couple of weeks back, a discussion got started on whether
Launchpad/bzr is the best platform for FEniCS development.

Sites like Bitbucket and GitHub are competing heavily to offer
superior services to coders, the development of bzr seems to have
stagnated and Git offers several attractive features over Bazaar.

We've discussed various options over the last week with several
developers, and done some testing and evaluation of our different
options. Based on these discussions, Garth and I would like to make
the following proposal:

1. Move all the code to Git

2. Move all the code to Bitbucket

3. Move the user questions to http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/

4. Move the mailing list(s) to fenicsproject.org

5. Move all the code into a single repository using Git subtress

Some comments:

- Bitbucket and GitHub seem very comparable. One small advantage of
  Bitbucket is that they allow free private repositories for academic
  use, which some of us already use heavily for papers and
  presentations.

- If we later want to switch to GitHub, it would be a very lightweight
  operation, since it would only involve moving a Git repository (not
  user questions, mailing lists, project teams etc etc). We can also
  mirror the Git repository on GitHub right from the start so that
  GitHub users can access it conveniently.

- I've asked the moderators on scicomp.stackexchange whether they
  would welcome FEniCS user questions and they are very welcoming.

  http://meta.scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/338/can-scicomp-stackexchange-be-used-for-project-specific-questions

  Some work will be required to create instructions on which
  questions are appropriate to send to scicomp.stackexchange, and
  which might instead go to the mailing list.

- Let's start with a single mailing list fenics-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
  If we need more, we can add it later.

- I haven't thought about the Launchpad PPA service, so that remains
  to be discussed.

What we do now is:

- Hear back from the community. I've had a chance to talk to most of
  you here at the FEniCS'13 conference in Cambridge, but not all.
  Please state any objections.

- Move the code over to Bitbucket as soon as we can. Then the rest.

PS: Thanks to Andy for being so obnoxious and bugging me about why we
are still on Launchpad, and for suggesting the use of
scicomp.stackexchange for the user questions.

--
Anders