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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!"
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?
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."
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.
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"
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 -
Standardization of what? This project doesn't really have much to do with that, although that will hopefully be a side benefit. The main thing is that it's a resource for Debian developers to use in collaboratively working on their apps, which will be nice. I think this'll be really outstanding for documentation, which is pretty much always done collaboratively.
The other thing is that it should help people who aren't official developers contribute to projects. Currently about the only thing you can do is submit a patch through the Debian Bug Tracking System and hope that the maintainer adds it. This will encourage collaborative maintainership, which is something that the project as a whole is advocating a lot these days. It'll also help a lot of people who are new contribute without packaging every little program on the net.
The other benefit, and this is where standardization can come in, is that it will provide a potential central repository for all Debian-specific items. This is a good thing, because it lets people from other projects take them and reuse them, thereby standardizing on a solution rather than reinventing the wheel. Of course, that's not guaranteed, but hopefully it'll wind up being useful.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
On the other hand, the real newbie (the one that is intimidated by the huge amounts of different projects on SourceForge) now has a place where he can easily find the Debian-specific packages he wants. It would enhance the newbie-friendliness of Debian.
Does anybody know if there are other sourceforge installations that dedicate themselves to some specific "sub-genre"?
:)
apt-get install sourceforge
Whoa! There you go. Whatever you like it to be?
Just kidding. It's very much depending on what sub-genre you'd like, and approach those who'd most likely sponsor it. Whatever it is, your sponsor must have huge resources at his disposal. May be given a trial on this big iron to start with?
If you didn't care about the existence of cvs.debian.org for the last whatever number of years, then you won't need to care about Alioth. This is really just replacing all the manual setup and administrative tedium that went with cvs.debian.org. (Actually, I don't understand why it's being reported on /. in the first place, but anyway.)
PEBKAC on your part aside with regard to portage (on a 233 it doesn't take anywhere near that amount of time to list or rebuild the cache), and aside from your misinterpretation of the kernel changelog (there are four other kernels, btw, did you check into one of those? Did you have trouble with the default kernel? The process priorities problem was exceedingly rare).
I've also never broken my userland to the extent that I require a reinstall; did you read the part about Gentoo being for power users and being a learning platform? Yeah, if you're coming from RedHat, obviously you're going to screw it up. That's no problem. But be patient until you learn how Linux works, that's what you're there for isn't it?
I always hear people saying "I use Debian because I just want to get work done" but something about it just doesn't ring true. Apt is a fantastic package manager I grant you, but whenever I install Debian I do without debconf. I know what I'm doing, thanks.
So from my perspective the main thing I'm concerned with is packages. Are they up to date? Are userland packages like KDE or X released promptly when there are new versions? The answer is an unfortunate no. The stable branch of Debian refuses to merge new versions in a dynamic way, instead insisting that stable is stable and you must use unstable to get the latest.
So here I am having to either move to an unstable branch of Debian, which I've seen break before, or add all kinds of third party repositories (Can you say UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE) to my sources.list. What happened to just wanting to get work done?
I'd use Debian if they were timely about new versions of software in a stable release, rather than making me wait 24 months for something I can knock on and say I TRUST THIS.
To any Debian developer reading this: Is it possible to institute such an official backporting process without my having to use a Debian variant? I'd very much like to see this aspect of Debian's package management brought up to speed. I like Gentoo, but I don't like having only one choice and no fallbacks on which to rely. Debian would fit the bill perfectly for me.
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
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.