Re: Subdomains considered harmful (was Re: List of GNOME applications)

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 08:24:03 +0100 (CET)
"Vincent Untz" <vuntz gnome org> wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> On Tue, February 14, 2006 11:57, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> > However, it's not the responsibility of the web team to care about the
> > web pages and promotion on all the various sub-projects of GNOME, IMHO.
> > I prefer to think of
> >
> >   http://projects.gnome.org/
> >
> > as a sort of independent entity. It would obviously get a sort of front
> > page that lists all projects.
> 
> One important question that I've not seen discussed yet is "what should
> we do with subdomains?"
> 
> Do we want lots of subdomains (developer, library, live, status, www,
> projects, foundation, etc.) or one website (www.gnome.org) with
> directories.
> 
> IMHO, people tend to think of websites on various subdomains as totally
> different websites. I'm not sure this is what we want. In some cases,
> it makes sense (for live.g.o, eg), but in most cases I believe we should
> not promote them (they can still exist and work), but promote one website
> with useful directories.
> 

I prefer to think of the entinity projects.gnome.org for a number of
reasons:

 a) The projects may need a different backend than the GNOME ddp
    website. I don't know if their maintainers would prefer to work
    with a CMS or with static HTML pages or with something completely
    different. It might be that their opinion differs between their
    different projects.

 b) The projects *are* something different to the GNOME ddp. It just
    means they have a CVS/SVN and a bugzilla account. It does not
    (automatically) mean they are GNOMEy. It seems useful to show the
    distinction to outsiders. It may also be useful to show that their
    services are potentially open to others. I have always had the
    impression that being a project on the GNOME servers is kind of
    elite.

Maybe the best description would be forge.gnome.org, using the
reference to sourceforge.

At the same time, it may make sense to move foundation.gnome.org back
into the wgo directory tree: the foundation is the heart of the GNOME
ddp, and the maintainer of the foundation pages is likely to be
interested in maintaining the wgo pages as well.

Also, the foundation is the "legal arm" of what the wgo tries to
promote and represent. Having it on a seperate "server" may indeed
trigger a false signal. The only drawback are the php scripts used by
fgo.

However, that's just my opinion. When the SVN transition is done,
moving the trees will be easier and we could start to consider it a
serious suggestion.


Cheers,
Claus