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

Good to see

[jazir1979]

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"?

Will the standardization effort...

[smittyoneeach]

...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...

Re:Will the standardization effort...

[krmt]

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.

Re:Trying very hard to not turn this into a troll.

[CoughDropAddict]

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."

Sourceforge?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Gah!

[Alioth]

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!!

You Did It

[krmt]

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.

My developments

[trotski]

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!

Re:Cool!

[hetta]

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".

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.

I think this is bad

[Chatterton]

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 :-(.

Re:I think this is bad

[cjwatson]

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.)

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

Check this out!

[entrigant]

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