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!"

Comments

Re:Good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody know if there are other sourceforge installations that dedicate themselves to some specific "sub-genre"?

Like Savannah?

Re:Sourceforge?

[krmt]

Well, in this case, if you don't like it, you can always just use "apt-get source packagename" and grab all the source as is. You can also use the standard Debian Bug Tracking System, Mailing Lists, IRC channels, and the like.

Nerd shit: origins of the name Alioth

[scubacuda]

For what it's worth...

... Alioth is another name for Epsilon Ursae Majoris.

The graceful curve of handle of the Big Dipper (the Plough in Great Britain), among the most famed of celestial sights, represents the tail of Ursa Major, the Greater Bear. Third star in from the end, "Alioth" relates not to a bear, but to a "black horse," the name corrupted from the original and mis- assigned to the naked-eye companion of Mizar, which took on the vaguely similar name "Alcor." Bayer's rough rule of assigning Greek-letter names more or less in order of brightness is quite violated here, as the Bear's bright stars are named from west to east, hence "Epsilon" for Ursa Major's brightest (bright second magnitude, 1.77) star, indeed for the 31st brightest star in the whole sky. A white class A (A0) star with a measured temperature of 9400 Kelvin, Alioth shines at us from a distance of 81 light years with a luminosity 108 times that of the Sun, from which we derive a diameter of four times solar and a mass close to triple that of the Sun. Large and luminous for its class, Alioth is probably ageing, and is nearing the end of its main sequence hydrogen-fusing lifetime. Of greater significance, Alioth is the brightest of the "peculiar A (Ap) stars," magnetic stars in which a variety of chemical elements are either depleted or enhanced, and in addition appear to change with great regularity as the star rotates. "Chemically peculiar" behavior in class A and B stars generally comes not from creation of elements, but from their separation in the relatively thin stellar atmospheres, some falling downward within the star's gravitational field, others lofted upward as a result of an outward push by radiation. Here, they are also apparently related to the Alioth's magnetic field. Alioth is classed as an "Alpha Canum Venaticorum" star (after the prototype, Cor Caroli). Its magnetic field -- and the chemical composition -- change from our perspective during the star's 5.1-day stellar rotation period. Some elements are highly concentrated into distinct regions that swing in and out of sight as the star spins. For example, the abundance of oxygen is 100,000 times greater near the magnetic equator than near the magnetic poles (which are displaced from the rotational equator and poles); chromium behaves similarly. Heavier elements, such as the rare earth europium, also display strong variations. Though visually the brightest of the peculiar A stars, Alioth is also noted for having one of the weakest magnetic fields among its class, only about 100 times that of the Earth, 15 times weaker than that observed for Cor Caroli.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good to see

[nsebban]

There are several foundries available (3D, BASIC, Clustering, Databases, Distributed Computing, Español, Gaming, GNOME, Java, Linux Drivers, Linux Kernel, Linux on Large Systems, Perl, PHP, Python, Russian, Storage, Tcl, Vector Graphics).

Re:Sourceforge?

[Khalid]

SF has been a wonderful gift to the FOS community and still is, but it's interface really sucks badly. It's very difficult to search the archives for instance which is one of the most important things in my opinion. I want to find easily if someone has had the same problem and how he has solved it and this is very difficult in SF. VA have concentrated all their efforts on the entreprise version and haven't updated sf.net for two or three years. Now there is some hope Tim Purdue one of the guys behind SF has reinitiated the GPL branch http://gforge.org/ and has integrated some patchs from the Debian branch and it looks quite promising.

Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?

[capedgirardeau]

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

Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?

[damiam]

Debian sourceforge is a site for the development of Debian packages, based on the Debian Sourceforge code, a fork of the official GPL sourceforge. It provides CVS, bug trackers, etc. It is intetended for use only by Debian developers. Users can still get packages however they want, from packages.debian.org or from apt-get.

Gforge is a separate fork of the Sourceforge code, also based on the last GPL'd version.

Check this out!

[entrigant]

www.freshmeat.net - Your new central hub. :D

Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?

[tcopeland]

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

Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?

[Ben Escoto]

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.

I'm not a Savannah developer, just someone who has a project hosted by savannah, but I've been impressed with them so far. Savannah may be based on SF 2.5 (I don't know) but I have seen many bugfixes, and some very useful improvements recently, like searchable mailing list archives. The developers are busy of course, but they at least plan to add new features like downloadable web logs and statistics.

it is primarily for use by gnu developers.

Currently Savannah has more non-gnu than gnu projects now. Maybe its original purpose was to help GNU developers, but it's not primarily used by them now.

Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH?

[tcopeland]

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

Re:Sourceforge?

[tcopeland]

Got suggestions? Head on over to GForge and send 'em in... also, what do you think of the GForge default theme?

Yours,

Tom