Osmocom.org migrating to redmine

In 2008, we started bs11-abis, which was shortly after renamed to OpenBSC. At the time it seemed like a good idea to use trac as the project management system, to have a wiki and an issue tracker.

When further Osmocom projects like OsmocomBB, OsmocomTETRA etc. came around, we simply replicated that infrastructure: Another trac instance with the same theme, and a shared password file.

The problem with this (and possibly the way we used it) is:

  • it doesn't scale, as creating projects is manual, requires a sysadmin and is time-consuming. This meant e.g. SIMtrace was just a wiki page in the OsmocomBB trac installation + associated http redirect, causing some confusion.

  • issues can not easily be moved from one project to another, or have cross-project relationships (like, depend on an issue in another project)

  • we had to use an external planet in order to aggregate the blog of each of the trac instances

  • user account management the way we did it required shell access to the machine, meaning user account applications got dropped due to the effort involved. My apologies for that.

Especially the lack of being able to move pages and tickets between trac's has resulted in a suboptimal use of the tools. If we first write code as part of OpenBSC and then move it to libosmocore, the associated issues + wiki pages should be moved to a new project.

At the same time, for the last 5 years we've been successfully using redmine inside sysmocom to keep track of many dozens of internal projects.

So now, finally, we (zecke, tnt, myself) have taken up the task to migrate the osmocom.org projects into redmine. You can see the current status at http://projects.osmocom.org/. We could create a more comprehensive project hierarchy, and give libosmocore, SIMtrace, OsmoSGSN and many others their own project.

Thanks to zecke for taking care of the installation/sysadmin part and the initial conversion!

Unfortunately the conversion from trac to redmine wiki syntax (and structure) was not as automatic and straight-forward as one would have hoped. But after spending one entire day going through the most important wiki pages, things are looking much better now. As a side effect, I have had a more comprehensive look into the history of all of our projects than ever before :)

Still, a lot of clean-up and improvement is needed until I'm happy, particularly splitting the OpenBSC wiki into separate OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoBTS, OsmoPCU and OsmoSGSN wiki's is probably still going to take some time.

If you would like to help out, feel free to register an account on projects.osmocom.org (if you don't already have one from the old trac projects) and mail me for write access to the project(s) of your choice.

Possible tasks include

  • putting pages into a more hierarchic structure (there's a parent/child relationship in redmine wikis)

  • fixing broken links due to page renames / wiki page moves

  • creating a new redmine 'Project' for your favorite tool that has a git repo on http://git.osmocom.org/ and writing some (at least initial) documentation about it.

You don't need to be a software developer for that!