WarFoundry website - the future

[IBBoard]

Following some comments by Brother Tober, I thought I'd post about the future of the WarFoundry website and what I'm planning to do to it soon. There has been a big delay in updates, but things should improve once my plans are in action and other people can contribute.

Firstly, the server. At the moment we run on a shared hosting plan (your standard web hosting). While that's sufficient for a website (or half-a-dozen or more, as we've got), it's not enough for source control and the other extras that a development project needs. I'm in the middle of setting up a mock Virtual Private Server to see what I can fit in the memory constraints before upgrading my hosting account. Most things appear to be working and configured now, so it shouldn't be too long until that is up and running.

As Tober mentioned, a decent project needs source control. I use Subversion at work and locally at home. While everyone has their favourite source control, I think Subversion is the best combination of features (revisions are an improvement over CVS's version-per-file) and support (Monodevelop has Subversion support, as does Visual Studio, but neither supports Git). It also integrates well with software project management and bug tracking tools like Trac or Mantis. As such the new server will be running a Subversion repository for WarFoundry and supporting code.

That's not to say that people can't use Git. One of the guys at work does some work at home and has had problems until recently because he has to do a day of work and do a big commit when he gets back (or lots of small commits that might end up committing broken code because of dependant changes). He's now working with a local Git repo that integrates with Subversion so that he can check in to his local Git when he's at home and then re-commit those to Subversion when he gets back.

Finally (as far as I can think of) the web/content. We'll be using Mantis for bug tracking etc, partly because it's a PHP script and there's not much point in eating memory with Python threads that will mainly sit idle when every other site runs PHP. Mantis covers bug tracking and also integrates with a Wiki. That'll give us the ability to discuss and develop ideas and plans as well as co-ordinating bug fixes.



If anyone thinks of anything that's missing then please suggest it. I'll post back as progress is made with various the site.

[IBBoard]

The server has now been ordered and I should be getting my account information in the next 72 hours. It'll take a little while for me to migrate the config from my test box to a full set-up on the real thing, but if it takes beyond the end of the month then I'll worry!

[IBBoard]

We've been migrated for a while now and I'm just starting to get the source code up. So far we've got anonymous public access at svn://svn.ibboard.co.uk/ and web access at [WebSVN removed].

The only projects that I've uploaded so far are my core libraries that I've developed for the Dawn of War apps and will be using (some more than others) in WarFoundry. The WarFoundry code should be up soon, but I've got to get Monodevelop working properly first :\



[edit] Removed SVN link - see below for Trac location

[IBBoard]

The WarFoundry source code is now in SVN. It's rather ugly so far and after starting to read a "cleaner code" book there's some bits that I'm definitely going to restructure in the API, but the code is available.

Strangely it built and ran before I committed it, but now I've checked it out and started working on it then it won't run and the logging isn't working. Hopefully I'll get to sort that out later tonight.

One word of warning regarding licensing. After some consideration everything will be released under the LGPL v3, but my libraries in the "ibboard" repository have never been LGPLed and parts of WarFoundry are still tagged as LGPL v2. I'll sort all of that out over the coming days and the final app and libraries will be properly licensed.

[IBBoard]

Having tried to set up Mantis for our bug tracking/source control integration I gave up. Using the interface isn't too bad, but setting it up is a pain. Instead I've managed to cram Python in to our server's small memory footprint and added Trac.

WarFoundry's Trac install is available at http://dev.ibboard.co.uk/projects/warfoundry, and includes publicly visible source code viewing. Plugins will be added soon so that people can sign up and contribute.

[IBBoard]

It's a touch broken in IE at the moment (the nav isn't too visible because IE doesn't support CSS standards properly) but the WarFoundry site now has a new look and it finally has a logo!

[IBBoard]

I fixed the WarFoundry site theme a day or so after that last post, and the theme has now also been added to the Dev site, although there's still a bit of tinkering to be done.