new project hosting provider... me?

[Robin Dunn]

Hi all,

Sorry for cross-posting, but I wanted to make sure that everybody in the 
community sees this message.  Please send follow ups to the wx-discuss list.

Over the past few months I've become increasingly dissatisfied with 
dotsrc.org as a project hosting provider.  We currently have CVS and the 
mail lists there, but I've never moved anything else to their servers 
because they still haven't convinced me that it would be worth the 
effort, even when sourceforge was having serious reliability troubles. 
Lately they have been taking longer and longer to respond to support 
requests, (one request a couple months ago sat there for almost two 
weeks until one of us gave them step-by-step instructions on how to do 
it) and they still haven't started officially supporting subversion, 
something they have saying for years now will be "ready soon."

I looked at a number of free alternatives, but they all boil down to the 
same problem - those services that do offer reliable service are 
typically slow (like SF.net), or there's some catch involved (Google 
Code's license restrictions).  So, I started thinking about using my own 
server instead, which has been very snappy and reliable. (It's currently 
hosting http://wxpython.org and http://wiki.wxpython.org, and is located 
at a colocation facility with tier-1 connectivity.)  The issue with this 
idea is that hosting the wxWidgets SVN repository (and perhaps 
eventually the mail lists and web site too) would probably take up a 
fair amount of the resources on my host, and to be on the safe side I 
should probably upgrade my hosting plan, which will cost about an extra 
$15/month.

Which brings me to my question for the community.  How many of you feel 
that it'd be worth donating a few bucks to get, among other things, 
faster source code checkouts and SVN support? (Finally!)  If we also 
move the mail lists and archives then we can switch back to Mailman and 
dump *@^$# ezmlm.

I'd be interested in whether you are willing, and also what amount you 
would feel comfortable in donating.  Ideally it should be an amount that 
doesn't hurt, there should be enough people donating that everybody 
could contribute just the cost of a few lattes and we would have plenty 
and some to spare.  No need to think of this request as making a 
commitment yet, I just want to get a gut feel for feasibility.  We can 
also discuss other possible solutions.  BTW, most of what I paid for the 
first year of service at my current level was paid with contributions 
that the wxPython users have made, although none of them knew that's 
what the money was going to be used for.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can do a test run of converting a 
snapshot of the CVS repository and setting up the server, so that we can 
get a better feel for resource utilization and response times.  The last 
time I played with converting from CVS to SVN a couple years ago, I 
remember it taking a few hours, but most of that was scripts crunching 
data.  When it was finished, the SVN repo had over 45K revisions in it. 
  So doing it again will be good practice for the real thing.

-- 
Robin Dunn
Software Craftsman
http://wxPython.org  Java give you jitters?  Relax with wxPython!