We want to help simplify your development process, therefore, we offer free project hosting services. We offer source repositories, file storage space, build utilities, collaboration services, project management utilities and more so you can focus on the fun of actual development. Each of these is described in brief.
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The Novell Project Hosting Services are just that, a set of services available to you to help your development process. To get started all you have to do is create a new wiki page and put any information you think is necessary to describe your project there. Put all of your planning and pre-development work on the wiki. Diagram your project. Plan the direction your new project will take. Then, if you have need of further services from Novell, such as a source repository or a place to put file releases, you will need to register your project with Novell.
The registration process requires you to tell us a little bit about your project and allows you to register a name for your project. You also have the option of setting up your own services somewhere and linking to them from your pages. Using the wiki as the base structure for project hosting allows your project to be as open or as closed as you need it to be. You can host your information on our services or you can set up your own and use them. Development should be done the way you like it.
If you have already registered a project and need some help moving on from there check out the Help:Setting up your project page.
This wiki has been provided so that information can be quickly distributed. This helps Novell keep its customers and users informed but also allows those who host projects here to keep their own users informed. We think this will help create a community of happy developers who always have the information they need. Project owners can create pages that describe and inform users about their project, its releases, its needs, and its goals. A set of custom tags and templates have been create to help unify the other services Novell offers, with the wiki.
A file repository is available to you when you host a project at Novell.
The repository has the following access points:
In order to upload files you must have upload rights. These rights can be granted and removed on the Project Administration page.
Note project administration rights are different from upload rights. If you are the project administrator you must grant yourself upload rights to be able to upload files.
Download of files can be done using the previously mentioned protocols as well as ftp and http. You can browse available files at ftp://forgeftp.novell.com/. All of the files are organized based on the hosted project's shortname. Directions are available to explain how to upload files from Linux or how to upload files from Windows using rsync and sftp.
Both CVS and Subversion have been made available as options for you to use as your source code version control system. When you create a project, you are allowed the option of whether you wish to make use of CVS or Subversion to manage the source code for your project.
If you want others to be able to contribute to and enhance your project, you should strongly consider using one of the version control systems to host your project's source code. Access to your code is limited to individuals to whom you give commit access.
As an option, you can select to enable anonymous access to your source code. If you enable anonymous access, any user of the site, even users who are not logged in, will be able to view and download a snapshot of your source code. A user must still be given commit access to your repository in order to make changes to your source code.
A CVS instruction template and a Subversion instruction template has been provided for you to give your users information about how to access your source repository. Within these pages you are shown the information that you need in order to begin managing your source code using our services. Templates have also been created instruct users how to browse CVS or browse subversion online. These templates can be used to create a page that will specifically describe how to access your source repository. There is also a custom tag available for searching you CVS repository.
There are many clients available that can consume CVS and Subversion resources like the one provided at Novell Forge. For details on how to set up your specific client, refer to the documentation provided with the client software.
For complete documentation on CVS, read the CVS Manual at cvshome.org.
For complete documentation on Subversion, read the Subversion Manual at the Subversion Homepage.
See the Red Carpet Instructions for information on client access and usage.
Mailing lists are available for hosted projects. You will have complete administration control over your mailing list. The mailman administrative interface can be found at http://forge.novell.com/mailman/admin/project_shortname_here.
When you send e-mail to a mailing list, all the subscribers of the list receive a copy of the e-mail you send. This is a means by which interested parties can remain informed on a project or community, and collaborate with other subscribers by sending and receiving mail on the list. To send e-mail to the mailing list, you simply create an e-mail addressed to list-name@forge.novell.com, where "list-name" is the name of the list.
Anybody may subscribe to a mailing list. The administrator should display the list on their project page so that users know where and how to subscribe. A custom tag is available to display a list of project mailing lists.
Novell Forge uses the GNU Mailman mailing list software, including their subscription and list administration pages to manage mailing lists. As the administrator of a project, you have the ability to manage traffic, volume, subscribers, and other aspects of your mailing lists. For details on how to use Mailman, check their website.
Forums are useful for providing threaded discussions around a specific topic. All forums are public. Anyone may post any information. Novell is not responsible for any content posted to these forums. If you find something offensive or irrelevant the forum admin has the ability to remove the content in question.
All Novell news forums are location on the news://forums.novell.com/ news server. All projects hosted at Novell are located in the novell.forge hierarchy.
It is possible to link a forum and a mailing list together. This will allow users to receive forum posts as email. As a mailing list administrator you can set this up by logging into your mailing list administration site (forge.novell.com/mailman/admin/listname). Enter your list password when prompted. (By default your password is the name of the list with "-passwd" appended to the end.) After logging in, click on the "Mail-News and News-Mail gateways" configuration category. The internet address of the news server is forums.novell.com. The usenet group is novell.forge.[project short name].[forum short name]. Then select yes or no to the next three questions on the page to allow posts to pass from the list to the forum and vice versa, depending on your desires.
Every project can take advantage of having their own bugzilla server. The project admin can create a new instance of bugzilla for their project on the Special:ProjectAdministration page. The user who creates the bugzilla instance has complete rights to administrate bugzilla. They can create classifications, projects, custom fields, define groups, and so forth. You can access your bugzilla instance by visiting http://devzilla.novell.com/project_shortname_here.
The general bugzilla documentation is available at http://www.bugzilla.org or http://devzilla.novell.com/forge/docs/html/using.html
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