As we know, lately java.net has been suffering constant performance problems and minor outages. Because of this, the topic of moving the project from java.net has been a recurring topic on this mailing list, dating back at least before JavaOne 2009.

And this week, java.net had the biggest outage ever. It rendered the entire site inaccessible for about 3 days, and the site is still inaccessible to many users in Europe, Latin America, Russia, and Asia, for which we still have no ETA as of this writing.

During this period, plugin downloads and updates were unavailable, new users weren't able to try out Hudson, and committers weren't able to push changes. Furthermore, because of a problematic code in Hudson, this outage rendered Hudson installations in the wild unconfigurable [1].

What I'm hearing from the Hudson community is that this is just not tolerable. So I think it's time to move off from java.net --- This is putting me into a very hard position, but I think I have no other choice, really.

The hard part is to figure out the migration plan. This is where I invite the community for suggestions and discussions.

As a starting point of the discussion, I suggest the following plan:

- Move Subversion repository to Kenai [2]. I already have a cloned repository (via svnsync), and we know the people who manage Kenai, so they should be able to import it.

- Move the project website to http://hudson-ci.org/ This is a server we own and manage, so we can control the cache related headers and other things.

- Downloads and update center metadata from dlc.sun.com, mirrored from the java.net Maven repository. This is a highly-available clustered servers that Sun uses for everything from Solaris to JDK, NetBeans to OpenOffice.

- Bug tracker to http://issues.hudson-ci.org/ that we run by ourselves.

I think mailing lists can wait, but Kenai would be a natural place if we are to move, given where source code is going.

This proposal involves in us running some services on our own (like we currently do for Wiki), and these services currently run in Sun-owned network. As we discussed some time ago in IRC, I'm working on opening up the access to such servers to the community, so that multiple people will be able to manage those systems.

My track record of keeping Wiki up and running isn't all that great, but OTOH without owning it, we wouldn't have been able to install plugins we wrote and define custom macros. So I think it's worth the trouble.

Finally, the real credit goes to Andrew Bayer for initiating this discussion.

[1] http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Dealing+with+java.net+outages [2] http://kenai.com/projects/hudson