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Julian's thoughts on what we could and should do with the Subversion project as a whole.

Community

Communication technology

General

  • keep using Open technologies
  • keep plain email the baseline standard of communication
  • integrate 'forum' and 'mailing list' forms of access
  • integrate long-form and chat-form if possible
  • integrate archives / logs, permalinks, searching

Email: Forums and Mailing Lists

Problem: Simple old mailing lists are inconvenient for new and occasional users. They have weak integration with archives, issue tracker, etc.

Some proprietary forums e.g. Google groups already attempt to mirror and integrate with our lists, with some degree of success, but we are mainly ignoring it.

We should seek to integrate better with forums. For a start: let users know that it's an option for them (on our 'mailing-lists' web page); and see if we can make some better steps of integration (such as unified permalinks).

For a longer term solution, I wonder if any suitable open source software exists, or if an ASF group might consider developing/adapting something.

Short-form chat (IRC)

Problem: The IRC chat systems we use are inconvenient for new and occasional users. They have weak integration with archives, issue tracker, etc.

Use Matrix as an upgrade path from IRC. That is my strong recommendation.

Matrix is Open, bridges to existing IRC channels, has good UI on mobile and desktop, is simple enough for newbies, has permalinks and can act as an archive, can be self-hosted.

Matrix is ready for immediate ad-hoc use by individual participants in our IRC channels, through the Freenode bridge operated by matrix.org, and is being used in this way by at least two svn-dev members.

In future it might be better for the ASF to run its own Matrix infrastructure: server, bridges, etc. The ASF would then control its own data, its own user accounts, and its own integrations with archives, commits, issue trackers, etc.

Examples of migration to Matrix in other IRC-based communities: Wikimedia, Drupal

Integrate archives / logs, permalinks, searching

Problem: Past communications are scattered across systems and storage locations, with no consistent archives or permalinks, so cross-referencing is difficult and non-permanent. Our issue tracker and wiki provide only links that are tied to their current provider technology.

Develop some sort of permalink endpoint hosted on subversion.apache.org that accesses the various archives through technology-ignorant URLs like "/issue/1234" and "/issues/".

A baby step is the '.message-ids.tsv' file in our web site directory, holding a mapping from haxx archive URLs used in our web pages to email message ids, with (in the commit log message) a script to generate it. There is, as yet, no automation to use the mapping in any way.

Tasks:

  • start a URL-space map for our resources; initially populate one entry, e.g. "/issue/<number> → issue <number>"
  • implement some simple automated handling (e.g. redirects) for that

Software Distribution

Problem: Subversion packages are outdated or unavailable for many platforms, especially server/cloud environments (e.g. Docker) and mobile (e.g. Android).

Examples:

  • Ubuntu says trusty (14.04LTS): 1.8.8; xenial (16.04LTS): 1.9.3; bionic (18.04LTS): 1.9.7
  • OpenSUSE says Tumbleweed: 1.7.4; Leap 15.0: 1.10.0; Leap 42.3: 1.9.7
  • pkgs.org lists the current package versions for many traditional Linux/BSD distributions
  • no 'subversion' or 'svn' packages in the SNAP store
  • Android: the only svn-client is OAsvn[-Pro] (unmaintained, working, primitive), based on svnkit 1.7.5
  • Docker: a few svn-server recipes on Docker Hub, e.g. garethflowers/svn-server
  • NAS: Synology svn server pkg 1.9.7; QNAP svn server pkg 1.7

What could we do?

  • reach out to individual maintainers and ask if they need any help or just a ping?
  • encourage companies to take on packaging (WANdisco & CollabNet keep up to date; what about Assembla?)

Documentation

The Svn Book

The authors of the Svn Book no longer maintain it have recently been offering to hand its ownership to the Subversion project.

What should we do with it?

Man Pages and Help Text

The built-in help is half way between a summary and a detailed reference. The Book contains an index which is a variation on this. We never got around to generating man pages or other formatted help.

Tasks:

  • Generate svn help and man pages from common source: there is an old patch as a starting point

Code


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