If you read this blog on a regular basis you may recall that back on May 12 I blogged Caught Off Guard Novell Forge svn is Gone!

I had missed the email and had not known that Novell Forge was going away as of March 2010. So as it was, the Novell Forge svn server had already been running way past the deadline when I found it was down on May 11 and 12. That morning I googled and found the notice about it. So we quickly moved to Codeplex with a new Mercurial repository which I have since found to be a joy to use. Ultimately I felt the whole situation had been a blessing in disguise because I like Mecurial so much better than Subversion.

Then a few weeks later on June 6, a surprising thing happened, there was a post in the forums where a user said he just got the latest version of the code from svn. As it turned out, the svn repository at Novell Forge was back online!

So the next morning I did some research and found this post and this linked post about how to get svn history into Mercurial. It seemed pretty straightforward so I kicked the process off wondering if it would really work given we have history in the svn repository going back to 2005. The process started working, it scanned the repository and started counting down from 6000 plus change sets that I guess it was converting to Mercurial change sets. So that was the morning of June 7, 2010 and it finally finished running this morning sometime before I got up. Today is June 28 so it ran for about 21 days. The conversion process was surprisingly robust in that a few nights (including the screen shot below where it was getting close to finishing) it would lose its connection with the server and stop running, but I would kick it off again and it would scan and then pick up where it left off. The process was killed one night because my computer went into hibernate mode an would not wake up without powering it off, and another night a forced reboot by windows update killed it, but every time it managed to work again and pick up where it left off.

So now I have the ability to browse change history going back to the beginning of our svn repository using TortoiseHG with a Mercurial repository on my local machine.

I'm kind of glad we started with just the latest code in a clean repository at Codeplex because this much history takes up a lot of space on disk, but now it is nice that I will be able to have an archive the source code history on CD ROM.

I have to say that I am pleasantly amazed with Mercurial and TortoiseHG!

Anyway, thought I would share the happy ending!

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Hi All,

This is a heads up to anyone working from our svn repository. Yesterday afternoon as I tried to do an svn commit I got an error that it could not connect to the server. I figured it was a temporary issue but it was down still this morning so I did a quick google for "novell forge svn is down" and what I found totally caught me off guard. Apparently the service is shut down completely and I was never notified it was coming and did not see the announcement about it. So I had no time to prepare and migrate to another project hosting. Of course I still have the latest version of the code on my machine but all the history of changes is lost as far as I know.

It sure would have been nice if this had been communicated through more channels like an email to project administrators or to the novell forge mailing list.

So, today I have to figure out the go forward plan and execute it as quickly as possible so I can get back to normal development tasks.

The 2 viable choices as I see them are either hosting the code at SourceForge where we can continue using svn and TortoiseSVN for all source control operations or hosting the code at Codeplex. The advantage of Codeplex would be that source code activities would now be captured as project activity and possibly help us get recognized on Codeplex as being a very active project whereas in the past we never got on the list of most active projects partly because they had no tracking of our source code activity when we were hosted on Novell Forge. The downside would be that we would no longer be able to do all source control operations with TortoiseSVN. There is an svn bridge built into the Codeplex service so it would still be possible to do svn checkout and svn update and probably commit would also work, but it does not support merge which is a very important function when you maintain different branches of code and want to merge changes from one branch to another. But the real source code control system behind Codeplex is Team Foundation Server and we would have the option of using Visual Studio Team Explorer. My perception is that branching and merging is a lot different in TFS so there would be a learning curve to get up to speed as compared with continuing to use svn at SourceForge. This would only affect those with commit access though, users just doing checkout and update could use TortoiseSVN to get the code from Codeplex.

Github would also be a possibility but would require a learning curve and different tools for working with source control. I would love to have been able to consider Google Code but they don't support our use of the Common Public License and I don't think we should have to change our license to make Google happy.

At the moment I'm leaning towards using Codeplex. It is the go to place for Microsoft centric open source projects and we already host our download files there and it seems advantageous to consolidate our source code repository there. If anyone has an opinion, feel free to weigh in with comments.

UPDATE: I've completed the initial checkin at Codeplex, you can now get the latest code again, using TortoiseSVN, the url is https://mojoportal.svn.codeplex.com/svn/trunk

It was a fairly smooth migration to Codeplex and it all seems to be working ok and back to business as usual.

UPDATE 2010-05-19: We had some issues where some client machines could not get all the files using TortoiseSVN while other machines had no problems. After trying for several days to figure out why it didn't work on a problem machine we had no success in finding the cause or solution. So yesterday we reset the repository and are now using Mercurial instead of TFS. New instructions for getting the code with TortoiseAG can be found here. At first I was a little hesitant to switch to Mercurial but after reading up on it, it seemed like it might have some advantages. So far I'm really liking it better than svn.

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Big news today that Codeplex now supports svn bridge on the server. I'm thinking it would be very good for the mojoPortal project if we move our source code repository there, it would get us a lot more visibility among ASP.NET developers.

The Codeplex repository actually uses Team Foundation Server and in the past you could still connect with TortoiseSVN if you installed a client side svn bridge. The problem we faced with mojoPortal is that some developers work with mojoPortal on Linux using MonoDevelop and there wasn't an svn bridge for Linux, so it could not work for developers working on Linux. That pretty much made it not an option for us. Now, if I understand the announcement correctly, with the server side svn bridge, there is nothing to install on the client so it should work with the command line svn client. I will have to test it out before making a move, but I'm leaning very strongly that way. If anyone in the mojoPortal community has strong opinions about it, now is the time to sound off. Novell Forge, where we host our source code now has been good to us but I think being a part of the Codeplex community would be good for getting more exposure to a wider community of ASP.NET developers.

UPDATE 2008-09-22

I've been trying out the Codeplex svn bridge and its mostly working but not currently able to do merge. The Codeplex team has been very helpful and responsive and is looking into the merge issue. We should know more in a few days, but as long as we can get the merge working I see no reason not to move to Codeplex. Thanks for all the input, I'll post updates as things progress.

UPDATE 2008-09-27

The latest update from the Codeplex team is that its going to take about 4-8 weeks for them to implement support for svn merge. So we will have to wait a while and try it again after they implement this. To me this is good news. I was afraid the answer was going to be that they only support svn checkout and svn update. The fact that they are going to get it working (or at least try) is very good news even if we can't move to Codeplex right away, we will be able to move there when this feature is implemented. I was surpised that they think svn merge is a rarely used feature since I use it all the time merging changes from my sandbox into trunk. It makes me wonder if I use svn merge more than most svn users. I thought my use scenario was very common having trunk and branches, and sandboxes. I generally work in my sandbox and merge changes to trunk at the end of each day as long as my work is at a stable point. I'm curious what work flow other svn users have.

Several good folks have emailed me this morning to let me know the download files are missing from Novell Forge. They are supposed to be available on this page but are not:
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Mojoportal

I have requested help on the Novell Forge Mailing list. Hopefully they will respond soon.

Thanks for letting me know about this issue. I will post an update to this post as soon as its resolved. In the meantime svn checkout still works.

Joe

UPDATE 11:10 am EDT: Still haven't heard from anyone on the Novell Forge list but did find the ftp url where you can download the files:

ftp://forgeftp.novell.com/mojoportal

Joe

UPDATE 11:15 am EDT: The file downloads are working again. Thanks! to whoever fixed it.

Currently the source code repository and file downloads for mojoPortal are hosted on Novell Forge. Several years ago I chose Novell Forge because they were offering Subversion aka svn repositories and at the time SourceForge was limited to cvs. Over time my satisfaction with Novell Forge has declined and now I am considering whether to move the project to a different provider. The current options to consider are:

1. Stay with Novell Forge, its been fairly reliable but there was a week long outage last year and currently I am not able to add a user to the project due to some issue in their system and when I send a message to the mailing list I get nothing but crickets chirping. Novell Forge seems almost abandonded and certainly a very low priority effort by Novell though I'm a big fan of Novell and their work with Mono and openSuse. I don't really blame Novell as it seems like providing this kind of infrastructure is a cost center with little if any benefit to their bottom line. The whole Novell Forge plan seems to be in flux maybe it will eventually settle down but if you look at the 2 newest news items on the old Novell Forge, they migrated everything to Media Wiki in 2006, so that site is here and now they seem to be in the throws of moving to yet another wiki engine here which you can only get to with a Novell login. Presumably there will be some benefit to it but it looks a lot like the current wiki and there wasn't much response on the mailing list when the new beta site was announced so it makes the impression on me that the Novell Forge community is not exactly a thriving one. Staying with Novell Forge would be the easiest choice in terms of effort but I don't seem to be getting any help adding a user to my project so staying may not be a viable option.

2. Google Code - I'm a big fan of Google and I wish it were an option but unfortunately the company that would do no evil has an agenda when it comes to open source licenses and does not offer Common Public License as an option so moving there would require a license change which is not something I'm inclined to do as it would require permission from all previous contributors. It also rubs me wrong that they have this agenda which would coerce me into changing my chosen license. I understand their goal of reducing the proliferation of open source licenses but their list is too short and leaves out established OSI approved licenses. No-one should have to change their license just to get project hosting.

3. CodePlex - Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into hosting open source projects and CodePlex seems to be gaining popularity in the .NET world. There might be some benefits to mojoPortal if it were a member of the CodePlex community, we are still very unknown compared to things like DotNetNuke which everyone knows about. I'd like to be able to consider Codeplex but they use Team Foundation I believe for source code. They have a client side utility called svnbridge that allows users to access the repository using svn and they are working on a server side svn bridge so no client bridge is needed. If that were ready today I'd seriously consider going with Codeplex but I'm less inclined at the moment because I don't want any difficulty checking out the code on linux and I really like svn and not sure I would like it as much if its not working the same in the back end as svn.

4. SourceForge - the first major player in open source project hosting and probably still the biggest. They have long since added svn to their list of services. They seem very committed to what they are doing and they seem to have a thriving community. This is the option I'm leaning towards. It would be a bit of work moving the code but it would probably be worth it in the long run.

Any thoughts or opinions?

Joe

UPDATE: Since posting this I did get a response from Cory Aitchison from Novell on the Novell Forge mailing list and he is helping me with the immediate problem of adding a user so for now I think we will stay with Novell Forge and see how things look after the new migration. In hindsight my comment about no reply except crickets chirping was probably not fair. I did get a response to the message I sent today and I fear it may have been my own fault that I did not get a response yesterday because I sent it from gmail but my message may have bounced because I'm registered on the list with my yahoo mail account. It all forwards to my gmail but I think I forgot yesterday that I needed to specify my Yahoo account in the from box. I applogise for that and thank Cory for his help.