Let's talk about deploying Snowy, aka Tomboy Online

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

Hey folks,

I'm one of the maintainers of Snowy, the AGPL Django web application
that lets users synchronize their notes to a central server, view
(and, eventually, edit) them online, and share them with friends.

We have chatted on-and-off with various folks from the infrastructure
team (Paul, Jeff, etc) and Stormy, and it seems we're all in agreement
that Snowy would make a great test case for GNOME hosting
user-oriented web applications.

Snowy is far from 1.0, and lacks many features and much polish, but so
far it has been stable and synchronization has been reliable.  We have
been expanding our unit tests to try to validate our security model,
and our WSGI deployment guide has been tested and verified to work:
http://live.gnome.org/Snowy/WSGI

We think now is a great time to get Snowy deployed on GNOME servers
for alpha testing by a few select users (who are willing to risk their
data to Snowy and to the GNOME servers and infrastructure team).

We have a really (really) rough draft of a roadmap for how we see this
going down.  You can read it here, but please keep in mind that it is
very much a draft: http://live.gnome.org/Snowy/TomboyOnlineRoadmap

Also, in the Snowy product in bugzilla, I have added a Tomboy Online
component that is intended for bugs related to the GNOME-hosted
instance of Snowy.  This could be a good way for the Snowy team and
the infrastructure team to collaborate on outstanding work.

For myself, I do not have a lot of experience with deploying or
maintaining web applications.  Brad, the other maintainer, has quite a
bit more experience, but less free time.  We are hoping that you
talented folks on the infrastructure team can fill this gap for us, so
that we can all have a little more confidence in this project.

As far as branding goes, I originally envisioned that this deployment
be referred to as Tomboy Online, and hosted at tomboy-online.org (or
.com; I own both domains).  If the infrastructure team or the
foundation feel that different branding would be more appropriate, I
am certainly open to the idea.  If there is a goal to eventually have
several very integrated services, then I could see the benefit in
having, for example, online.gnome.org/notes or something.  Anyway, at
this early stage, we should just pick something and do it, and we can
always change later as we learn more.  I lean towards Tomboy Online
due to the brand recognition and the fact that Tomboy is available on
non-GNOME platforms.

Alright, so much for introductions.  Let's get to work.  I would love
to put together a list of concrete tasks to get this started.  I'm
happy to discuss the nitty gritty on this list, or in #snowy on
GIMPNet.  We also have a snowy-list but I'm guessing deployment
discussion is more appropriate for gnome-infrastructure-list.

If we can make enough progress before May 3rd, it would be interesting
to propose Snowy as new GNOME module (in a new web app suite) for
GNOME 3.0.  Regardless, I intend to put Snowy on the GNOME release
schedule starting in the 2.31 dev cycle.

Thanks for your time,
Sandy