Re: [Ranger-users] ranger infrastructure

[Miodrag Milic]

Redmine is great, I use it exclusively to manage 10+ projects each including bunch of programmers. 

The one thing it is missing is good forum, but you could disable it and put link to OSQA or some other tag driven place. I believe tags are the best form of organisation now. There are some plugins for redmine that provide tagging features for some objects in it, but not for forum. Also, putting a lot of redmine plugins may be problematic when you later want to update it - I used around 10 plugins and had to remove some during each update. If you use Redmine, make sure to install it and update it using SVN as that is the fastest way.

The main negative points for Redmine IMO all exist when you have more then 1 project - for instance you can't group people per project, use authorization per user etc... 

Perhaps plugins could be maintained just the way they are done on redmine itself: http://www.redmine.org/plugins. Plugins itself are on github and portal serves for discovery.

GIthub is great place, but I don't think that options for maintaining the knowledge base or advanced forum communication are there.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Joshua Landau <address@hidden> wrote:

On 25 April 2013 16:56, Roman Z. <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Instead of just talking about the idea of a forum, let's talk about the
> infrastructure in general.  The network of services that are related to
> ranger in some way is:
>
> ranger
>  |-- Savannah: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ranger
>  |   |-- Homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/ranger/
>  |   |-- News: https://savannah.nongnu.org/news/?group=ranger
>  |   |-- Issue Tracker: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=ranger
>  |   |-- git: https://savannah.nongnu.org/git/?group=ranger
>  |   '-- Mailing list: https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ranger-users
>  |
>  |-- Arch Linux:
>  |   |-- Forum Thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=93025
>  |   '-- Wiki Page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ranger
>  |
>  |-- GitHub:
>  |   |-- git: https://github.com/hut/ranger
>  |   '-- Issue Tracker: https://github.com/hut/ranger/issues
>  |
>  |-- repo.or.cz:
>  |   '-- git: http://repo.or.cz/w/ranger.git
>  |
>  '-- Various package maintainers

Gah! This is too many!

For Savannah, I would abandon all but the mailing list and all the homepage pages, as they are the only pages I've found useful and non-redundant.This, however, depends on real usage statistics and not *my* usage statistics.

You are right to think a Q&A system could replace the One True Thread and I think it could help clear out the other issue trackers.

I've no proof in Redmine's usefulness, I think I might leave Jostein Berntsen, as he's the tool's main proponent, to answer that for me.

In regards to git, the GitHub one is probably best because it Googles best. I'd advocate that as the primary git host.

The map would simplify to:

ranger
 |-- Savannah
 |   |-- Homepage (and home-subppages): http://www.nongnu.org/ranger/

 |   '-- Mailing list: https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ranger-users
 |

 |-- Super Q&A system: [LINK]
 |
 |-- Arch Linux Wiki Page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ranger
 |
 |-- GitHub git: https://github.com/hut/ranger
 |
 '-- Various package maintainers

I then think that the ArchLinux Wiki Page, on further inspection, isn't all that expansive. It'd be fine to treat that as a small external thing and leave it out of this map. That leaves two areas where discussion actually happens - the mailing list can stay more "dev-oriented" and the Q&A can be the OTT replacement.

> 3. What would be a good system for publishing plugins and patches?

Well, you know what I'm going to suggest again ;). Package... MANAGER! An online directory where people can post and pull packages (under admin supervision, I guess) should be sufficient then.

> [2] http://www.osqa.net/
> [3] http://www.question2answer.org/

(The internet, btw, seems to prefer Q2A)


@Michishige Kaito

> As far as I can tell, you have everything you need with Savannah. What you do have is a lot of redundant stuff, but that shouldn't bother you. Just keep Savannah clean and up to date."

Savannah hasn't proven popular so far and I really don't like the interface, plus a bug tracker really isn't a good Q&A place.


@Mantas

> Read the Docs [1] for documentation.

Ooh, that looks nice.

To be fair, I've only just realised that "1?" and co. still work since we changed help page styles, so my primary point is that I think we need hyperlinked pages in the inbuilt help. However, if we want to go full blown it will look quite pro. I just don't know if we have enough manpage material for Read the Docs.


@Jostein Berntsen

> I believe Redmine would cover it all

Can you show me that Redmine is good at what it does. In my short scanning I've seen no real benefits to it, but I'll be happy to be shown wrong.

> The easiest way might be to keep it at 

> github and set up a wiki and project page

I'm not sure a wiki page would help with Q&A and hosting it on GitHub is likely not to be nice on the non-dev crowd that uses Ranger.

>The Arch Linux thread should kept as it is, I think, it has a load of great info.

I can understand not removing the page, but it's too big to want to let grow, à mon avis.