jefferai

Many KDE developers are on Facebook. A while back I wondered if it would be possible to have an official KDE developers’ network on Facebook — after all, there are networks for schools, jobs, cities, and more (and for many developers, KDE is literally or figuratively a job…)

As it turned out, there was a "Kde" network — but something was odd. To join a work network you have to have an email address affiliated with the network. KDE owns kde.com and kde.org — so who was this? The only other "KDE" I could find that seemed like it would be legit was the Kentucky Department of Education, and I rather doubted it was them, because they would likely have used all-uppercase KDE as well. So I started an inquiry with Facebook, trying to figure out if either it was someone squatting on our name (and trademark) or whether it was some legit organization — in which case, would they mind donating the network to us?

After several months of back-and-forth with the people at Facebook, who were very nice (if a bit slow ), I’m happy to say that we’ve regained the KDE network (properly capitalized) as our own. I still don’t know the whole story as to who was there before, and never will due to their privacy policies, but I’ll say this:

• If you were in the "Kde" network before and Facebook asked if you would mind donating it to us, and you did, thanks so much!
• If someone was simply squatting in the "Kde" network before, then thanks, Facebook, for kicking them out!

To join the network, go to Settings -> Networks, and enter KDE and your kde.org email address in the appropriate fields.

Today at the Akademy General Meeting, it was mentioned that Gitorious.org is being seriously looked at as a hosting solution for our Git repositories (as opposed to running an instance of Gitorious ourselves). Since I have been a major part of pushing in that direction, I feel that it would be prudent to make sure that those interested are aware of the relevant discussion and the current status.  So, for those interested, read on.

Please note that this is *not* a post about why KDE is migrating to Git, why this is a good idea/bad idea/neutral idea, etc. This is purely discussing the hosting aspect of Git.

First, I would encourage you to read this kde-scm-interest mail, which I sent to the list on July 2nd. It goes into a good amount of depth as to why Gitorious.org could be beneficial for us, and the rest of this post will assume that you have read that email and the others in the thread, as it will simply update the information therein.

On Monday a large group of interested people, including KDE sysadmins and the guys from Shortcut AS, went to lunch to discuss the technical issues. The output from that discussion is as follows:

• The vast majority of those present feel that Gitorious.org would be the best choice, with the following being the main reasons:
• Shorcut could provide a SLA (Service Level Agreement) guaranteeing a minimum level of service, such as uptime and available bandwidth, providing professional hosting services and easing burden on our system administrators.
• As David Faure noted, user account creation is becoming a large burden on our system administrators, which is not something that we would have to administer if using Gitorious.org.
• It should be noted that the above was not a unanimous opinion.
• KDE does have infrastructure and bandwidth; it could keep one read-only Subversion server available for historical reasons, and convert the rest to serve as backups or possibly load-balancers. Or to put it in a more general fashion, KDE can reduce hosting costs (which will likely be covered by sponsors) by working with Shortcut. It is not a question that this could be done, but rather what the right method would be for doing so.
• The Gitorious developers have a feature branch where they have already fixed one or both of the current showstopping bugs relating to rights within the shared Git repository. They have said that this should be merged into mainline within a week (not sure if they meant a week from then, or from the end of GCDS).
• The hosting could be set up in such a way that it can be accessed via git.kde.org.
• Post-commit-hook functionality will be available; the Shortcut guys are currently working with us to determine how we can migrate or emulate pre-commit-hook functionality.

We have two projects that are chomping at the bit to get onto Git ASAP: Amarok and TagLib. Amarok will be converted first and will serve as the initial guinea pigs to iron out any issues. Barring any major issues being found, TagLib will be converted in short order.

I hope this gives everyone a better idea of KDE’s Git-hosting plans. If you haven’t checked out Gitorious.org, I encourage you to do so; it’s made huge leaps and bounds in the past six months and has become quite a great tool.

Please direct any questions or feedback to the kde-scm-interest mailing list at: kde-scm-interest at kay dee eee dot ooo arr gee, not to the comments section on this blog.