Hi Paul,

My problem is not in the knowledge of software development proccess. I was
chief of the software development in commercial software company which box
software you were able to buy in almost every store. Open source development
is still far a way from the commercial development where each hour or dollar
is very important.That's not a problem in my view.

The problem is that I had oportunity to use some other project's (for example
FCKeditor) forums, bug and patch tracking on Sourceforge and was pretty
satisfied. I've registered Campsite on Sourceforge in 2002 and at that time
Sourceforge pretty sucked. But that's not true anymore.

I simply don't see so big Trac benefits over Sourceforge tools which could
neutralize all those costs in time and money needed for its installation,
hosting and maintenance. Not to mention time needed to learn how to use it.

Very simple. Just a cold calculation. No emotions.

Best,

Nenad


On Friday 12 August 2005 10:31, Paul Baranowski wrote:
> Hi Nenad -
>
> I dont think we can consider ourselves as "only" software developers -
> i.e. someone who only writes code, and thats all. There are other
> aspects to software development than just writing code, and we need to
> be able to do all of them. Though working on documentation is boring,
> it doesnt change the fact that we have to be good at it and make it as
> easy as possible for people to use. Though managing a bug tracking
> system wasnt in the job description, it doesnt change the fact that we
> need one, and that it should be the best one available.
>
> Software development is a continuous process - and there may be
> something is the future that is superior to Trac, and when that day
> comes we will decide whether to switch. It doesnt change the fact that
> Trac is the best development tool available right now. Why didnt we
> stick with CVS? Because CVS will never, ever have the features that
> Subversion has. You would have to rewrite CVS from scratch to get the
> same features, and thats what the Subversion people did. The same goes
> for Mantis and Sourceforge - they will never, ever have the features
> that Trac has. For mantis, it is simply beyond their project scope, and
> sourceforge has too few resources to do this kind of change.
> Sourceforge has hardly progressed since it started, and its still slow
> and its interface is still unfriendly. Most importantly, we would have
> no way to write plugins to sourceforge or change it to suit our needs.
>
> The main point is that writing code is not the only job we must do in a
> software project. We still have to write documentation, communicate
> with our users, maintain our web presence, create a thriving developer
> community, etc. This involves maintaining servers and other
> applications, and there is simply no way around it. Outsourcing a core
> component like this is always too inflexible and adds another thing that
> is outside of your control. For a good example, look to Google...they
> build their own servers instead of outsourcing this to Dell or HP.
> Think of the job description for CAMPers as simply "what needs to be
> done" and it will give you a new-found feeling of freedom.
>
> - Paul
>
> Nenad Pandzic wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > To be honest, I'm for switching to the Sourceforge tools. I always
> > considered this kind of tools as something what should keep me away from
> > the boring development things and keep my time and concentration on the
> > software development. When I see all that time spent on the tools
> > analysis, installation, hosting and maintenance (not to mention time
> > needed to learn how to use it), I would prefer the Sourceforge tools. In
> > six months, you'd find some SuperTrac or some SuperSubVersion and It'd be
> > never ending story. In case of the Sourceforge tools, the only time I
> > would need to spend is to learn (incrementally) new features once a
> > while.
> >
> > Let's leave mailing lists on our server and put all other things on the
> > Sourceforge. There is no poet/writer on the world who cares about his
> > pencil like you do about your tools.
> >
> > Let's concentrate on the poetry...
> >
> > Nenad

------------------------------------------
Posted to Phorum via PhorumMail