[Printing-architecture] OpenPrinting code repositories in GIT format

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

another suggestion is Launchpad (launchpad.net), the service created by 
Canonical, mainly for Ubuntu, but any other independent project can use 
it (like for example HPLIP from HP).

Launchpad supports so-called project groups to join projects (would be 
OpenPrinting" in our case). The projects would be the upstream sources: 
cups-filters, foomatic-db, foomatic-db-engine, ippusbxd, ... and 
Nilanjana's new projects. As a Launchpad user (and the owner of the 
OpenPrinting project group) I can create projects and add them to the 
project group.

GIT as VCS is supported. There is also a way that users can suggest 
branches to get merged into the upstream repo, like GitHub's pull requests.

The bug tracker is much more sophisticated, and it supports attaching 
all kinds of files.

There are also many other development helpers: Blueprints, translations, 
questions, ...

For code series, milestones, and releases can be defined.

Bugs can get linked with all of this.

WDYT about hosting on Launcpad?

    Till



On 08/30/2017 06:10 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> with the Google Summer of Code 2017 we got three new free software 
> projects added to OpenPrinting. Nilanjana Lodh (CCed) wrote two of these 
> projects to improve the print dialogs of GUI applications.
> 
> The projects do not provide any GUI, but they make it possible to 
> separate the the dialog's interaction with local printing systems (like 
> CUPS) or network print services (like Google Cloud Print) from the 
> dialog itself using a frontend/backend architecture with the dislog 
> being the frontend and for each print technology (currently CUPS, Google 
> Cloud Print, ...) a backend. All print dialogs (currently GTK, Qt, 
> LibreOffice) will use the same backends and so adding a print technology 
> in the future will be much easier, in the ideal case the print service 
> provider supplies the appropriate backend for his service.
> 
> One of the projects is a pair of frontend and backend libraries to make 
> it easy to write backends and supporting print dialogs. The libraries 
> hide away the D-Bus interface between frontend and backend and the 
> mechanisms to find and invoke all the backends.
> 
> The other project is the CUPS backend without which the whole effort 
> would be worthless.
> 
> See Nilanjana's work here:
> 
> https://nilanjanalodh.github.io/common-print-dialog-gsoc17/
> 
> Abhijeet Dubey (also CCed) has implemented the Google Cloud Print 
> backend, making Google Cloud Print available to all supporting print 
> dialogs.
> 
> His work you can find here:
> 
> https://github.com/dracarys09/gcp-backend/wiki/1.-Google-Summer-of-Code-2017-%7C-Common-Printing-Dialog 
> 
> 
> These three projects need to be hosted as pat of OpenPrinting and, as 
> GIT turned to be the standard VCS in GIT format. And once thinking about 
> project hosting I am also thinking about converting cups-filters from 
> BZR to GIT and also move ippusbxd into OpenPrinting. ippusbxd is 
> currently hosted in my personal GitHub:
> 
> https://github.com/tillkamppeter/ippusbxd
> 
> Now my question is how to do all this hosting to also have it somehow 
> unified and not each project hosted in a different way.
> 
> There are two approaches:
> 
> Hosting on the OpenPrinting/Linux Foundation web site
> -----------------------------------------------------
> 
> Pros:
> 
> - OpenPrinting is part of the Linux Foundation, and the LF has the 
> hosting facilities, without any commercial interests.
> - All code on the web sites of the Linux Foundation (or at least what is 
> used by OpenPrinting) is free software
> - The Bugzilla bug tracker is an established system with a lot of 
> functionality, especially allows binary attachments (very important for 
> printing)
> 
> Cons:
> 
> - A new project GIT repo needs to get created by the sys admins of the LF.
> - There is a large community of GitHub users, for whom contributing to 
> projects on GitHub is easy (report bugs, post pull requests, ...), but 
> projects outside GitHub are not that easy (need to create LF account, ...).
> 
> 
> Hosting on GitHub
> -----------------
> 
> Pros:
> 
> - Using the de-facto standard of hosting with a large user community
> - As a user one can easily create a new repository for a new project
> - Pull requests allow easy contributing
> 
> Cons:
> 
> - Site software is proprietary
> - Run by a commercial company which could easily cease the service
> - The issue tracker only allows plain-text attachments. How to attach 
> print sample files or similar.
> 
> Now I would like to hear some opinions of you all on how we should host 
> the OpenPrinting projects.
> 
>     Till