I have been talking with Dave Hartzell and Johnathan Corgan about the web resources necessary to back the development of ACP, Namaste and other AMSAT projects. We talked about setting up Subversion and Trac, which we have used very productively for a few years on the GNU Radio project. Trac provides a wiki, bug tracking, milestones, history, and source code browsing.

We could set it up on the server in Rick's office, but that would involve a lot of volunteer time to set it up, manage it, and back it up. It also would involve putting more access into a box which will apparently have people's credit card info on it, which is clearly a bad idea. These roll-your-own solutions, like Eaglepedia are hard to sustain.

Johnathan has been using, and suggested that we use, devguard.com which provides exactly the kind of Trac and SVN hosting we need. For $7.95 a month they'll host it, back it up, and support an unlimited number of users. As the total data size and number of projects grows, you simply move up to larger plans which top out at 5 GB and $60/month.

Free volunteers don't come cheap. Neither does bandwidth. Proper security and backup systems are hard. Why not leave these things to professionals who do it all day long for a reasonable price?

Please check out their services at:

http://devguard.com

I would appreciate hearing everyone's thoughts on this. I feel strongly that this is the right way to go. This is a multi-million dollar project, so 20 bucks or so a month is in the noise.

Matt