Goals

There is a newer version of this page. You can find it here.

We have many goals for Allura. Here are some objectives and larger "projects" that you can help out with. Learn how to contribute to Allura here and find smaller sized tasks here.

We had some discussion back at
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/allura-dev/201404.mbox/%3C534C08B1.8080008@rcbowen.com%3E
and all the replies in that thread. It never materialized into an accepted logo for the project. A logo would be great, however I think designers are much better than developers at producing them :)

Update the website

https://allura.apache.org is very simple and not very exciting and appealing.

Whenever we have a new design, it will be easy to publish, it's just an SVN repo at https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/allura/site/trunk/

Improve performance

This is a never-ending goal :) We do have many specific tickets related to performance: https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/search/?q=labels%3Aperformance+AND+status%3Aopen And some research into "hot spots" has been documented at https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/6388/#263e

Performance measurement can be done with the TimerMiddleware instrumentation that is already wired into Allura. In development.ini set stats.sample_rate as a float between 0-1 and that percent of requests will be instrumented. Timings will be recorded in a stats.log file. Allura also works well with New Relic (a 3rd-party service).

Make Git/Hg/SVN repositories "indexless"

The current repository tools in Allura rely on background jobs to index information into mongo. Over time we have worked on removing that and using direct access to the SCM using the git/hg/svn libraries. Indexing everything in mongo has several limitations:

  • it takes time to do before your new commits show up (especially for a whole repo that was imported)
  • it increases the size of the mongo database
  • it isn't really faster than direct SCM access in most cases
  • Allura code has to mimic common SCM functionality, instead of relying on each of the SCM's own implementations (which should be efficient)

See more in our docs at https://forge-allura.apache.org/docs/platform/scm.html?highlight=indexless#indexless Past and current tickets related to the effort are at https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/search/?q=labels:indexless and particularly [#7828] which is a deep analysis of remaining mongo models.

Documentation

Allura is a very powerful robust system, but lacks documentation explaining how to do everything it can do. Our documentation is published at https://forge-allura.apache.org/docs/ and the source for it is at https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/git/ci/master/tree/Allura/docs/ A few specific documentation needs are ticketed at https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/search/?q=labels:docs%20AND%20status:open but there are many more need about simply how to do things.