Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:57:38 -0600

Hi Paul,

On Wednesday 13 January 2010 10:56:31 [email protected] wrote:
> I would be very grateful if someone involved in the decision to use
> Bazaar and LaunchPad would give the reasons of choosing this platform
> over other DVCS such as git or Mercurial as we are currently considering
> options for hosting GDA repositories.

There were a number of considerations, I'll try to touch on the main ones that 
come to mind:

* Functionality of the tool - All of the major DVCS tools are pretty much 
equivalent when it comes to the main purpose of the tool.
* Ease of use - Git has a reputation of being somewhat hard to learn, but in 
this crowd I don't think that's a major issue
* Portability - AIUI git requires cygwin to work on Windows, which is Jeff 
Hill's main development platform so must be well supported.
* Functionality of public code hosting sites - Launchpad seems to provide more 
features with simpler configuration than most of the other sites such as 
Bitbucket, Google code, github or Sourceforge.
* Acceptable Code Licenses - Some sites will not host projects using the EPICS 
Open License, or may need a special agreement to do so since it's not an OSI-
approved or common license.
* Legal - Argonne has problems with hosting site's terms of use that include 
the word "indemnify," and staff at APS were once told that they were not 
allowed to use SourceForge for that reason (bear this in mind if you want 
Argonne collaborators!).

At ICALEPCS Jeff, Ralph and I had agreed to use Mercurial on SourceForge, but 
I had to change those after further research and because I didn't want to 
delay the process waiting for answers from our legal department.

HTH, if you have questions about using and setting up a project on Launchpad I 
may be able to help.

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System