A while ago I released a helpdesk tool that I use to manage support requests, under the name of Jutda Helpdesk (named after my small consulting company). The project has received a slow but steady stream of patches and bug fixes, however it's always been a little tricky to manage with a single committer over at Google Code. To make life easier for everybody involved, I've renamed the project to django-helpdesk and shifted the source code and issue management to GitHub.
I thought I'd spend a few words talking about these two changes.
Firstly, the change in name. Because django-helpdesk was originally built for my own use internally at Jutda and WhisperGifts I released it under the name of "Jutda Helpdesk" when I opened the source up a few years back. There was a bit of a thought that I could release more products with a similar naming scheme, such as "Jutda Basket Weaver" and "Jutda Donut Maker". Those products never eventuated, leaving the only open-source product as "Jutda Helpdesk". This seems to have caused a bit of confusion, with people referring to the product simply as "Jutda" which does no good for either the helpdesk product or my business.
The next change was a move from Google Code to GitHub for the project site, including the source code management and issue tracking. The reason for this was twofold:
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For users to offer patches they had to log an issue with a patch and hope I could apply it sooner rather than later. By using GitHub, anybody can fork the project and begin making changes, meaning I don't need to be involved for people to share code changes.
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Every other Django project that I personally follow is on GitHub, and I prefer the git DVCS workflow over SVN. It seems most of the Django community is of a similar mindset, from what I can see.
So the project has been moved. I've migrated any issues that were open and that I feel need working on; most feature requests were culled out as I am not in a position to do custom development at the moment. Now that people can fork the project on GitHub I hope feature requests come in the format of pull requests or at least patches.
Lastly I've made a few other distribution improvements. The project is now on PyPi so you can install it using 'pip install django-helpdesk'. The listing over at DjangoPackages has also been updated so that you can see the PyPi downloads and mark yourself as a user of the package.
I would love to hear any comments or feedback you've got via e-mail or on Twitter (where I'm @RossPoulton. Enjoy!
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