GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 127895
mmmaybe should replace www.gimp.org
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
After the discussions at gimpcon2003, it was planned to replace the old web site (currently www.gimp.org) by the new one (currently mmmaybe.gimp.org) around September. It was also said that we had to have this ready before the first 2.0 pre-release. In a separate discussion, Yosh suggested to rename the old web site classic.gimp.org and to keep it around for a while before shutting it down for good. Several steps have been taken in order to prepare the move (telling the robots to stop indexing the old site, addition of links to the new site, preparation of the list of redirects - bug #116523, etc.) but the actual move still has to take place. This delay is hurting us. Some members of the web team have left or have decided to wait until the site is moved before doing anything else. This also causes some duplicate work because it is necessary to update the list of mirrors on both sites, for example. Let's use this bug for tracking the status of the move and what issues (if any) are preventing the new site from replacing the old one.
Following Dave's milestone setting on bug #124879 (about the mailing lists), I also think that releasing a new version of the GIMP without having a web site for it would be a waste. And since it looks like nobody wants to update the new site until it has replaced the old one, it would be nice if the switch could happen a bit before the release so that there is some time to add more of the new stuff that was planned for 2.0. Anyway, feel free to change the priority, severity or milestone to something more appropriate if you have an opinion about this.
I'm moving this to the 2.0 milestone since we are trying to clear the list for the 2.0 pre-release and this report isn't anything the developers can do something about. It's up to the gimp-web people to get together again and discuss how the move can be made. Then a TODO list needs to be set up and the work be delegated. Personally I am very disappointed that this hasn't happened yet and that instead bug reports are opened by the people that should do be doing the move.
The only thing that is still on the TODO list is to move the site to the new machine. Unfortunately, there is nothing that any of the gimp-web people can do about that, except wait until it is done. At this point, putting pressure on Yosh would just be rude because he said that he would do it as soon as possible and we have already asked him several times. As stated some time ago (in September?), there are a few things that still have to be fixed (such as the way the front page news are re-generated), but it will only be possible to fix them _after_ the move, or at least after some people from the gimp-web team have an account on the box that will run the new server. So the only thing that blocks the whole process is the availability of the new machine. Everything else depends on that.
Wouldn't it be helpful to create a working setup with server setup and everything and package it as tarball? This would reduce the work of setting up the site on a new machine. I have expected this to happen for quite a while already.
I don't think that a tarball would help, because all source files are in CVS (so it is better to get them from CVS than from a tarball) and the main thing that should be done besides running the install script is to create or update the web server config file (see bug #116523 for some suggestions) and it would make no sense to put httpd.conf in a tarball because I don't know what the DocumentRoot should be on the target machine. I suppose that the current setup on mmmaybe could be copied to a new machine, but I have no account on mmmaybe so I have no idea of how things are configured there. If there is anything else that I can do to help, please tell me and I will do my best. The common opinion on the gimp-web team is that the site has been ready since September and everybody is waiting for the stuff to be moved to the new machine. Also, in a discussion that took place on the 21st and 22nd of September, Yosh said that he was going to move the site (so he thought that it was ready to be moved and there were apparently no other prerequisites from his side) but he said later that he just didn't have enough time to do it.
Changing all www.gimp.org bugs from gimp product to the gimp-web product, including old closed/fixed bugs, and reassigning.
Closing this as FIXED since mmmaybe has been moved to wgo.