Re: Let's talk about deploying Snowy, aka Tomboy Online

[Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroed gmail com>]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Sandy Armstrong
<sanfordarmstrong gmail com> wrote:
> 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

Is there anything out of the ordinary in snowy or is this just a
standard django application?

> 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).

Using your tomboy-online domain is fine by me, but you might want to
run this by the marketing teams. The only thing I'd ask is if you want
to use tomboy-online.org, let us host the dns.

> 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.

We could also pawn this off on Ray :)
I'd be happy to help him with fixing the dns and mucking with the
apache config for wsgi.

> 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.

Sounds good. How about you put together the list of concrete tasks and
then we can go from there?

> 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.

-- 
Jeff Schroeder

Don't drink and derive, alcohol and analysis don't mix.
http://www.digitalprognosis.com