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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!"

38 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?
    1. Re:Good to see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

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

      Like Savannah?

    2. Re:Good to see by jsse · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:Good to see by nsebban · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

      --
      ____
      nico
      Nico-Live
  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
    1. Re:Will the standardization effort... by krmt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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."

    2. Re:Will the standardization effort... by mezelf · · Score: 2, Insightful
      ..., but the benefits of a variety of different platforms are lost on the newbie

      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.

  3. Re:Cool! by jazir1979 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?
  4. 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!

  5. 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.

  6. Re:Trying very hard to not turn this into a troll. by CoughDropAddict · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

  7. 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 krmt · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      "I may not have morals, but I have standards."

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Sourceforge? by Khalid · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Sourceforge? by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative

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

      Yours,

      Tom

      --
      The Army reading list
  8. So what are you going to do about it? by Wee · · Score: 2, Insightful
    You gonna bitch and moan, or offer to help correct that which is obviously paining you so greatly?

    Nevermind. You must be young.

    -B

    --

    Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.

  9. Re:Cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The utter ludicrousness of your all-encompassing statement is mind boggling. Have you ever taken the time to look at SourceForge? If not, some of the "half-baked ideas" you will find hosted there include gaim, Tcl, WxWindows, and about 7637 more mature, production ready, "half-baked" programs.

    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.

  10. Re:Or... by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 2, Funny
    Yes, but BSD might just not be here tomorrow, since it's dying. See, ports are great but BSD is dead. It's official. Netcraft confirms it.

    Haven't you heard of that there crippling bombshell? Heh.

    Actually I've been using CRUX for a few weeks and like the ports system enough to try BSD, though CRUX is customizable enough that you can drop in your own bootscripts, profiles, and other config files.

    --
    Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
  11. Gah! by Alioth · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Gah! by Gogl · · Score: 2, Funny

      Look on the bright side, at least you should get some karma out of it. ;)

  12. You Did It by krmt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

  13. My developments by trotski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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"
  14. Re:Cool! by hetta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 -
  15. Nerd shit: origins of the name Alioth by scubacuda · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  16. 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...

  17. 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 cjwatson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.)

    2. 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).

  18. 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.

    1. Re:Why I just switched from Gentoo to Debian by brad-x · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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/ -- //
  19. Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? by capedgirardeau · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  20. Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? by damiam · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  21. Check this out! by entrigant · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  22. Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? by tcopeland · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  23. More "source" in the forge by phorm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  24. Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? by Ben+Escoto · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.
  25. Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative

    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