Software forges are these kind of collaboration platforms that have been on our radar for years. Alvaro and I have been involved with their integration, deployment and maintenance during the last 5 years and now we are also helping some relevant communities to get the best from these products.
Apart from the work done with Allura integrating our analytics, we are very close to the FusionForge community. FusionForge is a free software application descendant of the forge implemented by the Sourceforge people a decade ago. We used it for a migration we performed for CENATIC (National Benchmark Centre for Open-Source ICT Application) during the last months of 2012. The aim of the migration was to move around 150 projects that were hosted in the infrastructure of the Morfeo’s community to a fresh instance of Fusionforge running on their own data center. The services offered by Morfeo were outdated, it was running a very old version of Gforge (FusionForge’s predecessor) together with a bunch of WordPress and Mediawiki installations. The main task was to design a process to get all the information from the services provided by Morfeo: Gforge, WordPress and Mediawiki, and move them to a fresh instance of FusionForge and WordPress.
All software forges share a very well know common problem, data lock-in. Moving projects from a forge to another is really a tedious task. As we wanted to migrate a big percent of the projects, our approach then was slightly different, we decided to take a snapshot of the forge database and using the scripts provided by Fusionforge to upgrade from its predecessor at the same time we pruned the information. This would not have been difficult if the Morfeo’s database were untouched, but taking into account that it was manually modified during years the task became challenging.
Since the new platform is running, the CENATIC forge is receiving important projects funded by the Spanish goverment, which really seems to be a good sign.
Besides the work funded by CENATIC, we are exploring the possibility to integrate our software analytics tools with FusionForge. If you are interested in a collaboration to achieve this just drop us a mail.
