OpenOffice.org Website - Light and Shadow
It is a good thing to have some paid support for operation the OpenOffice.org website. The site is running quit well since the birth of the project eaxctly 4 years ago. Ok, when got slashdotted, the site was quite slow, but this might not be the failure of infrastructe but the sussess of the OpenOffice.org project.
The collab.net infrastructure offers a framework where the most important stuff for doing software development, SourceControl (cvs), BugTracking and Webcontent, is very convient integrated. People familiar with SourceControl will enjoy the maintaince of WebContent with the help of cvs. Just do your changes with your favorite html editor (vi in my case) and commit it the cvs repository. Page got updated by magic on the site. At least for software developers, providing some "static" documentation or information this works perfect. Almost perfect. From time to time things are failing:
Our community manager, Louis Suarez-Potts, did some update for our birthday page last night and somehow the magic update of the new home page failed (experienced cvs user will see that cvs detected a conflict). Since collab.net provides granted support for the operation of the site, members of the regular OOo community don't have direct access to the infrastructure. This works well for regular problems, but it is a big problem if you want to fix a trivial problem immediately. Like this one.
In an Open Source Project with volunteers all over the world this should not be the problem. The project is working around the clock. In this case we will go the formal way: Write a new issue for this and wait for the resolution of the issue. Things get documented by this proceeding which is important if you several people working on the site. But you loose speed in fixing things, you got dependent on proprietary work of people.
This applies also for related items: Some things, like the cross reference (lxr), CVS Tree Control (bonsai), dynamic web content (php or other scripting), Online Databases (wiki), enhancement of content management services (plone) are available and well accepted in the various Open Source communities but the integration of them into the collab.net infratstructure seems to be a major effort. If we look back the past four years we see lots of minor improvements but the big wish list for the next birthday is always growing. It may be also in real life that the amount of wishes grows with child's lifetime, but from time to time it would be nice to get some wishes realized.
But anyhow, the project has good parents: If the infratructure part is the mother, we can see that the mother will take care of it's child, although her options are limited. The project also has it's thoughtful father: Louis. His community management always gives guidance to the growing child.
