[osis-core] reviving OSIS progress

[Chris Little]

On 1/5/2010 2:36 PM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> Chris Little wrote:
>> I think the loss of osis-user at whi.wts.edu as a discussion forum is
>> also a big loss for OSIS, so I'd like to see a new public forum for
>> discussion/help, be that a web forum, mailing list, or something else.
>
> We'd be happy to host an osis-user mailman list the same as osis-core
> but open subscribe.
>
> Or if people prefer forums, we'd be happy to host a forum like the ones
> at: http://crosswire.org/forums
>
> Both our forums and mailman lists can preserve archived history
> accessible via google.

I feel like OSIS would be best served by having these services not at a 
*.crosswire.org domain. It's fine to have them hosted on CrossWire's 
server, but we should try to get a system working like before, where 
CrossWire's server is hosting some other domain(s) that are exclusive to 
OSIS/BTG.

Just a quick summary of the former/existing domains used for BTG work:
bibletechnologies.org & .com are owned by ABS and point to the official 
server for the schema, docs, etc., namely bibletechnologies.net.
bibletechnologieswg.org was registered by ABS/hosted by CrossWire, but 
is now registered to a domain squatter in India.

Assuming whoever controls the DNS record for bibletechnologies.net can 
be gotten hold of and convinced to do so, I'd recommend adding a couple 
of new records:

1) Point the bibletechnologies.net MX record at crosswire.org so that 
Troy/CrossWire handles mail services. Then osis-core, osis-users, 
osis-editors, etc. may all be hosted there, but would use 
@bibletechnologies.net addresses. There is currently no MX record for 
bibletechnologies.net, so that doesn't pose a problem.

2) Point one or more A records (other than www) at crosswire.org, so 
that it may host other services as necessary. The subdomain(s) could be 
wg, wiki, labs, dev, or something of that nature, depending on what 
services we want to offer.

I don't know whether anyone has particular experience with any specific 
wikis or other service software, but we currently have MediaWiki on 
crosswire.org, and it has served us fairly well. Trac is another 
interesting package, which integrates a wiki with issue/task tracking, 
but I don't know whether OSIS particularly needs issue tracking.

--Chris