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Debian's Own SourceForge

Posted by timothy on from the join-us-now-and-free-the-software dept.

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!"

11 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Good to see by jazir1979 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  2. Will the standardization effort... by smittyoneeach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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
  3. Indeed cool... by Quazion · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

  4. This is good news! by peerogue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Sourceforge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Sourceforge? by pork_spies · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think SF is brilliant, especially because it is free. Somebody really is paying for me to develop free software when I use it.

      I am always a little worried though that it is a relic of the bubble era and will collapse, removing access to all the sources etc.

  6. FreeBSD's own SourceForge ? by dnaumov · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

  7. I think this is bad by Chatterton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :-(.

    1. Re:I think this is bad by camh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When I look for a project, I just type "fm project_name" into mozilla, where I have "fm" set up as a shortcut to search freshmeat. 99% of the time, it comes back with the project (it's probably 100% really, but you can't be too sure).

  8. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ...projects hosted there are guaranteed to enter the debian distribution w/o any of these debian is-it-legal-? discussions?

  9. Why I just switched from Gentoo to Debian by jrfonseca · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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:

    • having to wait 10 min to rsync portage plus other 10min to rebuild its huge cache
    • using a broken kernel (the last drop was when I read that during a whole month the kernel wasn't obeying to the process priorities! See for your self in its CVS)
    • having to wait 3 minutes just to get the list of the installed packages!!
    • most times a new version of a library was out the packages that depend on it got broken and have to be manually recompiled
    • many packages I need couldn't be found on portage (I did contribute ebuilds many times, but it usually takes too long to get accepted)
    • closed developer community (the development mailing list isn't open - no, gentoo-dev is for experienced users, and not even that nowadays, since almost everybody uses the web forum or IRC and I have no time for that)
    • over the time alot of things fail to work properly and you basically feel that you should emerge world to get a fresh restart but that would take ages and sounds like reinstalling Windows...

    The most surprising thing was that with Debian:

    • the computer got snapier - lower memory footprint
    • I could find almost all packages I need, even the lastest: if not on debian unstable, on unofficial apt repositories
    • apt and the debian mirror system is a really well thought and evolved system - download/query everythin is fast and efficient
    • kernels and kernel modules (especially ALSA) are so beautifuly handled with make-kpkg
    • I still can easily compile the performance critical applications from source to get the best of the processor capabilities

    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.