Slashdot Mirror
Debian's Own SourceForge
rescdsk writes "Raphael Hertzog recently announced
Alioth, a SourceForge installation dedicated for Debian use. All developers automatically have accounts, though anyone may get an account. Quoting the front page, the purpose of Alioth is multiple: to provide facilities to free software projects supported by Debian developers, to make it easier for non-Debian developers to contribute to projects initiated by Debian, and to support projects whose goal is to promote Debian or one of its derivatives. Go peer with great wonder!"
It's nice to see a seperate sourceforge installation for this. Sourceforge is so huge that perhaps it would be beneficial to split parts of it up into other seperate installations?
Does anybody know if there are other sourceforge installations that dedicate themselves to some specific "sub-genre"?
What's your GCNSEQNO?
Or... you can just use CVS included with your *BSD, the make install apache2 from ports -- with a CVS WWW frontend --; then you will not have to depend on these guys shoddy connection with massive responsetimes.
...be helped by this?
Understood, user choice certainly improves, but the benefits of a variety of different platforms are lost on the newbie.
The real benefactor of fragmentation in the Open Source community is Redmond...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Well, that's a very negative way of looking at it .. I admit there are many such projects around, but I really think that's a good thing.
In the world of "experimentation", there are bound to be many ideas that don't get off the ground. But many great projects are still hosted on sourceforge, and even for "half-baked" projects, it's fantastic to have a virtual playground for the open source community to come together and collaborate.
What's your GCNSEQNO?
Idea's are worth something to0, maybe there good maybe there bad, maybe they suck at coding, but please leave some respect.
I wrote some of my idea's on paper, why ? no idea, did i ever really do something with it, not really. Mainly i started and failed in finishing, but someday someone will do the same and gets someone with the power to continue and make us all a bit more happy. You will loose anyways if you dont try!
This effort looks a lot like Gentoo migration
damage control. Like a "see what we can do".
I personally applaud it.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
It's good to see that Raphael Hertzog explicitly mentions that Alioth will be reserved to Debian-specific artefacts. At first, I feared that it would be an alternate repository of all the deliverables, including the Debian-packaged distributions. Now that would have been a terrible mistake (duplication, maintenance nightmare, ease of code forking, etc...).
I think it's a good idea to have it separated from Sourceforge. Although it will require dedicated hardware, maintenance, the Sourceforge site is not meant to host distribution-specific bits. At least it's my understanding.
I don't know why most of the comments posted so far are so negative about it. Congratulations to Raphael Hertzog for setting this up. I'm sure it required lots of hours of hard work and discussions.
I don't think your average Debian developer gives a shit about people leaving Debian for Gentoo. In fact they're glad because it means less "trendy" users who flock to whatever is in vogue. A few years ago it was apt, now it's emerge. Meanwhile our lives go on trying to get real work done, as opposed to tweaking our systems for trivial performance gains or having "ultimate control."
I have to admit, whenever I see a project listed on Sourceforge I am hesitant. The interface to SF is pretty bad.
I would think that the concept could be re-implemented with a decent default layout.
Just my $0.02.
Nevermind. You must be young.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Code repositories such as SourceForge serve a dual purpose:
(a) they serve as a place where developers can host their projects and have the world critique them.
(b) perhaps even more important, they serve as breeding grounds for ideas. Just because some developer came up with a great idea that s/he no longer has time to implement does not mean it has gone to waste. If good enough, another developer may adopt the idea and bring the product to fruition or a company may decide to invest in its development.
If you truly do feel that most ideas on SourceForge are "half-baked" and backed by "incapable coders," then I cannot help you. Otherwise, please take the time to look through all those projects at stages 1, 2, and 3 in their development (on SF and Alioth). Who knows, maybe you can find something you can and want to contribute to!
Regards.
Oh wonderful. Not only do they steal my Slashdot nick, now I'm going to have one of those UDRP lawsuits against me for one of my domains!!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Does anyone know if this is using the Sourceforge software before they went proprietary.
Or are sourceforge useing Free Software again?
Yeah, I'll go for that.
I moved to Debian from FreeBSD specifically so I didn't have to patch at source and rebuild anymore. Can't be arsed, got work to do, binary is much better.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
"Look's like theres a security hole!"
Yeah, but Mozilla always shows the last part of URLs in the browser's status bar, so goatse.cx redirectors now only work with MSIE-using dorks. Though I guess that's still a lot of people, and they do have it coming for not using Mozilla....
Just idle wondering [see subject].
I'll bite.
What the hell does this have to do with Gentoo? This is meant to ease collaborative development among developers, most notably on Debian-specific programs (of which there are many), and to provide a place for people outside of Debian to go when looking for information on Debian-specific programs so that they can potentially be adopted in to other systems.
Personally, I'm really excited about this. Debian doesn't really need the former reason as much, as within itself Debian is pretty good about using Debian-specific stuff. It's the latter item that I think is good. Debian has solved a lot of problems already that could do well to be adopted in to other systems. Apt is the most notable example (and not as prevalent a one these days), but also the menu system, the debconf specification, and a massive amount of behind the scenes infrastructure that most people (even Debian users) don't acknowledge. Putting these in a place like Alioth allows more sharing. Debian states very explicitly in the Social Contract that it is about giving back to the community, and having an easy to access place helps with that very much.
So, in that sense, Alioth isn't so much about competing with Gentoo but with fulfilling the Social Contract, which has been the same old goal of Debian for many years. Nothing new there, if you've been paying attention at least.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
As a developer for debian, I find this most welcome news. Frankly, source forge does not have a focus on the Debian community, and it's a difficult place to find people who are interested and knowledgable in Debian to help out on my projects.
This will be a great way for me to get in touch with other developers and get thing's done.
Kudos to debian!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
How fast THIS link can shut :) It's like :)
up the idiot BSD is dying crowd.
the ultimate middle finger to any anti-bsd mouth-breather.
I suggest bookmarking it and spreading it liberally.
You'll NEVER hear a single convincing arguement to
explain away the obvious stability advantage FreeBSD
has over EVERY other OS that has ever existed.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Konqueror didn't protect me :(
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
What sourceforge needs is a way to, umm, _abandon_ abandoned projects. Dunno what I was looking for there, but among the tens of programs their search engine dug up, only one or two actually had any "meat". The rest were just project statements, with links to years-gone maintainer webpages.
In addition sourceforge is too big for its search engine. Nine times out of ten the reply to any search is: "we're busy right now, try again later".
-- Henriette's herbal -
Yeah, good point :)
What's your GCNSEQNO?
If you feel the need to talk about this go to a more suitable forum.
.
You can try markfiore.com for instance. Or even the Back Porch (or Religion'n'politics) at tech-report.com
Slashdot is already too full of clutter for you to make it even worse. Doesn't show much intelligence on your part, and creates a feel of rejection against your point.
After seeing this article, I wondered, why doesn't the FreeBSD project do something similar ? There is a lot of FreeBSD-related projects that would be better off being hosted in a centralised place, with all their mailing lists and forums. That would make following their progress so much more easier...
Anywho, on to my real point - quite a few times i've been in the situation where I saw some very left minded people programming, and not knowing much about what they were doing - I could 'visualize' a fix. Of course I would have no way to program it, but I could tell them how I could see it being done. I guess what i'm trying to say (and this statement is very generic so don't correct me as I know i'm not entirely right) is that behind that person that made the atom bomb is that absent minded creative person that knows how to do it but can't for some reason or another
. That all I wanted to say - you can keep reading if you want. (im going into a "this one time at band camp mode now) Anyways, this one time at band, er on IRC right around the time the guys who were learning quakeC were really starting to understand it, I started talking to the quakeforge guys about motion bluring (that being something that looked neato wowwie to me at the time) and I suggested that it might be feaseable to simply draw the model twice on the client side. Make it a complete client side cvar so that people with crappy vid cards could turn it off. I suggested simply monitor an entities speed and then based on that speed, draw one two or how ever many instances of it to get a generic motion blur effect. He thought it was cool, but of course it really wasn't something that was on the top of their agenda and I guess he said it was too tough to do - I don't remember. I regress back to my point - it doesn't take a genius or a code monkey to think of a good idea - almost anyone can, but the truely good ideas are ones that are collaborated on by both left and right brained people. (i'm not saying my idea was good, it was just an idea and a way to do it)
Ouch - mt fungers are cramping.... tume ti stip.
I am a debian user, and I think this is bad. Sourceforge is my principal source of informations when I search for a project that do what I need to do. Now if I need to go to sourceforge, then Savannah, then Alioth, then myownproject.org, then myownprojecttoo.net... Well in this case I think a bunch of project could pass under the radar and will be never seen by others :-(. Sourceforge was good because there is a single point where to search against (Sorry but I never go to savannah :-/). Now If I need to go everywhere to find something, Google will be my friend, bur Google is not the panacea too. This will have the side effect that Sourceforge, Savannah, Alioth, and others will be parcelated and unuseable like all the webrings you can find and cannot use because you don't know them except if you are in it or know someone in it :-(.
...projects hosted there are guaranteed to enter the debian distribution w/o any of these debian is-it-legal-? discussions?
I have to agree; there are way to many "dead" projects on SF. What the need is both a way to kill a project, and an automated culler. If there has been no activity in the past six months, then send an email to the project owner. If there is no response, then kill the project. Easy.
As for the search engine, the last email I had from SF indicated that they were still moving to DB2, and the search engine would be the next to move. They expect that to solve the problems when under heavy load.
Actually I just switched from Gentoo to Debian on my main PC (a laptop with PIII Celeron 700MHz with 198MB ram). I was using Gentoo for a year now and just installed Debian on other less frequently used machines but now switched completly to Debian.
Basically in Gentoo I was sick of:
The most surprising thing was that with Debian:
I know my computer isn't the fastest out there, but while the timings may vary, the scalability problems with portage are still there, so it's just a matter of time until faster computers start experience the same delays.
Anyway, this is also reflection of my interests and my experience. When I started with Linux I wanted RedHat because it was the most familiar to everybody else. I switched to Gentoo because I wanted more and latest stuff which I couldn't easily find on RedHat (RPM hell!), and I wouldn't mind if things got broken as I could usually help sorting everything out. But now my interests are narrowing down, and I still want the latest stuff, but I just don't want that to get in the way of my daily work.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I know lots of people can do a better job but here is my breakdown:
;)
Sourceforge - Was supported as on open source project by VA software. Last public version was 2.6, VA promised a cleaned up 2.7 since 2.6 and below were really a mess, all sourceforge.net specific hardcoded names, paths, databases, hosts, etc.
VA never came through and cleaned up the thing.
Debain Sourceforge - was born while VA still supported sourceforge as open source. It is an excellent, cleaned up 2.5/2.6 sourceforge codebase that uses all the benefits of apt to install sourceforge and all the associated programs (mail, listmanager, cvs, ssh, web, ftp, ldap, postgress). This was almost impossible before debian sourceforge made it possilbe.
Savannah - a sourceforge 2.5 installation, i dont think its distributed really, or actively developed. it was just a successful minor clean up so it would run of the sf codebase. it is primarily for use by gnu developers.
gforge - all praise their gods, tim perdue was allowed to work on sf code again, he was the father of the sourceforge system. as soon as he was legally allowed to work on the code again, he started the gforge project. it is a much cleaned up and simplified version of sourcefore, maybe even a major rewrite i forget.
now get this, gforge and debian sourceforge projects have pooled resources so you can still use the excellent debain installation tools to get a fully working gforge installation now too!!
the above is mostly accurate i think, if its not apologies, it is just too late here for me to look it all up like you could have
cheers
Wax on, wax off baby!
Gforge is a separate fork of the Sourceforge code, also based on the last GPL'd version.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
www.freshmeat.net - Your new central hub. :D
And now we needa freshmeat for debian related cool stuff!
It could be calle,d freshveg for all your potatoe needs!
IMO, Debbugs isn't that great either. Its major problem from my POV is the read-only web gui. Considering one of the projects on the new SF site is a GNOME front end for the BTS, I'm obviously not the only one discontent with Debbugs.
Personally I find Bugzilla far superior to Debbugs as well as the SF BTS, but the lack of an e-mail interface to Bugzilla is apparently keeping it from replacing Debbugs.
I know complaining is easy and helping out is what counts, but I don't have the resources to actually do anything about this. Thus, my complaints is all you get. Take 'em or leave 'em.
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Actually, it does show up in the status bar for IE 6.0; however I am usually inclined to not blindly click on links from people who have goatse.cx listed as their homepage. ;)
... I thought it read "Debian 0wn3d Sourceforge."
;)
Take-off every
GForge is definitely the "main line" of SourceForge development now... with many new features, including nascent SOAP support, better task management, and an active development community, it's definitely worth a look-see if you need a project management tool.
Here's the GForge install I support - CougaarForge.
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list
If a project hasn't released any files/code, and isn't hosting a page, I'd say killing it is in order if the maintainer can't be found and/or bothered to respond to an "are you alive" message. But if something has been released but has no maintainer, I think a better idea is to build a database of "orphaned" projects that more active maintainers can pick up or acquire code from. Then, if *that* doesn't result in any activity (no new maintainer, and no file downloads) for 12 months or so, I'd say that un-hosting the files is a good idea.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
There is a major architectural problem that needs to be sorted with the SourceForge family.
The original model (all data on one logical site) meant that the success of SourceForge effectively killed VA as it became too expensive to manage with 500,000 users and no income.
The key thing that needs to be centralised is the ability to search across SourceForge instances as there are now several important ones:
* SourceForge
* IBM's Developer Works
* Savannah
* etc, etc
What you need to be able to do is search over all the repositories to see if there is a project that meets your requirements. Any given punter searches and downloads from many, but submits/joins/contributes to only a few...
I would have thought that they would use G-Forge. Wow.
The above is not worth reading.
When will people learn that there's a lot in a name? :)
Using a not so memorable and hard to spell name is annoying as it's hard to associate that site with what its function is.
Personally I would have called it something catchy like debsource, debelopment, debresource etc..
Reducing all the dead wood would decimate that forest!
Save the FOS Forest!!!
[I think their search problems came when they moved to IBM DB2. I don't remember it being that bad under good old Free databases.]
Gforge forgoes the most difficult aspect of sourceforge which is providing shell and CVS access (which means no LDAP integration either). OTOH it does add some neat features like gantt charts.
War is necrophilia.
Here is a Brazilian sourceforge...
http://codigolivre.org.br/
They host some of the cool projects that are being used at the University. http://www.univates.br/
If there's anything the Debian crew would be loathe to give up it's their "is-it-legal-?" discussions.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yes it does. nimrod. Im using it right now.
Hover over the link and you will see the target displayed i the status bar at hte bottom. Read the whole thing and you will see that its a redirect to the goat site. Sheesh. Just LOOK.
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
When will we see an installation of Slashdot dedicated for Debian use?
However, running into a ton of unfinished, abandoned, stale, etc code in the forge is a real pain at times.
Making an area for "ideas", and "abandoned" would be nice. Then bored programmers could pick up uninitialized ideas easily - or abandoned projects - but the general user looking for semi-functional code wouldn't have to wade through stuff that's non-functional or antiquated.
I don't like this. The more we steer toward developing software that is intended to run exclusively on a specific Linux package like Debian, the less general compatability and more partitions in what the world is now beginning to know as "Linux" will be created and perpetuated, and that will hurt the pursuit of larger marketshare and acceptance to the masses.
For example, it really pisses me off that Windows XP dropped support for new software running on old Windows versions, and even worse, vice versa with not-so-older Windows version software not working on XP! Sleazy. That, if I were not already a devoted Linux user (which I am), or a Kazaa pirater (which I'd only be if I were on a Windows box), would keep me from upgrading to the newest version.
The best thing about RPM to me is that you don't have to spend twenty hours downloading a zillion dependencies. It has improved my quality of life significantly. While Debian's better support that already exists for their own package system is pretty appealing to me, if a popular new SourceForge-like site which is exclusive to Debian picks up steam and people start programming new stuff under that format, we are just going to get a more complicated Linux world that will only hurt us in gaining marketshare. Maybe you don't care about marketshare, but as a Linux advocate, I do.
So you Debian boss men, cool it on the exclusivity, and keep up with the spirit of your "by the people for the people" essence which contrasts with the corporate goals of larger public Linux companies.
Do we really want to put ourselves further in a position in which we have to intramurially port to other Linux packages in addition to porting to other OSes? If I got the whole idea of what's going on here factually, I apologize.
Well, i did look. I just didn't have my window that wide :(
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Hmmm.... I'm not sure what you mean. GForge does support CVS access (albeit via a series of cron jobs that create the repositories and CVSROOT/readers files and such) and LDAP integration (although I've never used it since storing user info in the database works fine).
The above sentence is not a LISP expression, although it comes close.
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list
You can use the /stand/sysinstall program on FreeBSD to download and install already compiled packages. I do it all the time on my old computer which is too slow to compile anything. Start sysinstall, goto Configure, Packages. If you want to use packages from a different branch, i.e. 5.0-CURRENT, you can choose "Options" on the main menu. Sysinstall also has an Upgrade option to upgrade your system, but I haven't used this yet.
Thought you'd like to know.
ok i went to alioth.debian.org registered, username, password, etc. they mailed me a link to login can't login with the username i had so i tried to have them send me my password says there is no "username" so i try to reregister, with same 'username" maybe it didn't go through the first time. tells me that there is already the same username taken. has anyone else had this problem? has anyone been able to login to the website?
In the original sourceforge when you sign up as a developer you can log into the box because the authentication is via LDAP. This allows you to log into cvs using ssh.
IIRC gforge does not do this for you. You need to manually create accounts for your CVS users. Also according to Tim Purdue the LDAP code is still untested.
It seems like it ought to be possible to use pam_pgsql though.
War is necrophilia.
Hm.... that's true in some sense. I mean, the user/group creation is done via a cronjob; it's not manual, but it's not immediate, either. I suppose you could set the cronjob to run every 5 minutes, but there would still be a lag.
I haven't used the LDAP code, so I can't speak to that...
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list