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FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the its-never-easy-for-the-fsf dept.

bluestrain writes "It's been almost 4 months since Savannah was hacked. The site is still not completely functional, no new projects have been accepted since December 2003. Now it seems that the FSF is abandoning Savannah in favor of Gforge. RMS himself has confirmed the plans. A few developers are questioning the change. Hopefully the dust will settle and savannah can start accepting projects again."

14 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. There are some pretty big sites running GForge... by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...already. Savannah moving over is certainly a big one, though.

    Stuff like this is why we're continuing to optimize GForge's SQL...

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  2. good news! by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Interesting
    No offense to the OSDN/Slashdot guys, but sourceforge has started to suck dick lately. Constant downtime, searches that don't work, CVS running a week late, and now PBS-style appeals for money on the front page.

    If you just need a good (and free) public CVS server, what other options are there besides sf and gforge?

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    1. Re:good news! by FreeLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

      but sourceforge has started to suck dick lately.

      I hadn't heard about this new feature. It could be rather interesting. But SourceForge has been having too many problems for too long. It seems as though no one is maintaining it, they simply disable a feature when it breaks. Additionally, I have always been concerned about having so many projects and information sites in a single OSDN basket. One never knows what the future holds for OSDN.

    2. Re:good news! by daishin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, why dont you invest lots of money like SourceForge into servers and making it as good as it can be, I mean being over-loaded with people such as you who then complain that its starting to suck, well ofcourse it is and if its a problem you should help those good people out and donate resources to them.

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    3. Re:good news! by tcopeland · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > it means 20-minute mailing list searches,

      Although SourceForge will be much faster now that PlayFair has moved to Sarovar :-)

      No, but seriously, folks. If the top 10 projects moved off of SourceForge, I bet that'd eliminate 75% of the load. eMule alone gets downloaded a quarter-million times a day...

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  3. RMSs history on security by Rapid+Home+Offer · · Score: 3, Interesting
    For Stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and practical. On the ethical side, Stallman pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that design required a major overhaul. -- Free as in Freedom

    The decision to move to GForge was made by Bradley Kuhn and the system adminitrators, according to Richard Stallman. They considered Savane could not be made secure enough. -- Sylvain Beucler, 2004

    Seems like Stallman has lost sight of his roots!
  4. Subversion support? by jared_hanson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone know if they can get subversion support in their as long as they are going through the effort to switch? I'd really like to see a free OSS hosting solution using all the latest and greatest tools. That and I'm not to sure about trusting the future of SourceForge, given VA's seemingly complete retraction from the open source community.

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  5. Gforge is very specialized. by Electrawn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Gforge may be great for high traffic sites like Savanaah, but for low traffic 1-10 project sites I use Xoops+MyXoopsForge or Novell Forge. I think Savanahh made a good choice here, but they are stuck once they port. Novell Forge is the other choice.

    GForge uses some highly optimized transaction stuff and database functions inside postgres that probably should be in the PHP layer.

    Reminds me to port MyXoopsForge to postnuke to take advantage of ADODB! Compatibility or speed?

    -Electrawn

  6. VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourcing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting



    Go look for yourself. VA is pimping SourceForge off as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. They don't even hide the fact.

    Have a look for yourself: VA Software

  7. About gna.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Many of the previous savannah contributors have already moved to gna.org, which is sometimes referred to as savannah's successor.
    I have already moved all my projects to gna a month ago. Gna is way more stable and way faster than savannah. I love it.

  8. Not exactly. by devphil · · Score: 4, Interesting


    There are two reasons this decision is somewhat controversial for those of us maintaining FSF-related projects:

    1. The decisions are made in a closed environment.
    2. The Savannah admins have not demonstrated sufficient competence nor responsiveness. (Not meant to be a personal attack; I think they only have a few part-time volunteers.)

    For example, GCC is under constant pressure by RMS to move from its own server (that happens to be hosted at Red Hat) and onto Savannah. But this pressure has been resisted for the same reasons, and it will continue to be resisted regardless of what "packaged development environment" Savannah is using.

    With regard to the pair above, (1) the GCC maintainers have never been invited to share their concerns with the Savannah maintainers; when they speak up, they're ignored, and (2) Savannah gets fscked up on a regular basis, and complaints are ignored. For example, Savannah is supposed to be mirroring the GCC CVS repository, but it falls over constantly, leading to even higher load on the GCC servers as users switch over. The Savannah team has a long long way to go if they want to hold themselves up as a reliable open development site.

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  9. Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. by NightSpots · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's unfortunate, because the code is insecure as hell.

    For instance, 'source.php' lets you view the source of files, but only if 'sys_view_source' (a global) is set in the config.

    Of course, they don't check to see HOW it is set, but rather, allow you to pass it on the _GET global, which overrides the config, which, of course, lets you view the source of any file:

    Compare:

    http://gforge.org/source.php?file=source.php


    http://gforge.org/source.php?sys_show_source=tru e& file=source.php

    Nice, eh?

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  10. Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. by gavinroy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The PostgreSQL community is also migrating to GForge from GBorg. I'm pretty excited to see the outcome. There are some things I'd like to see in GForge, which can easily happen if enough people take the time to submit patches, such as modular support for revision control systems. Remember GForge is a fork of Sourceforge, maintained by one of the original architects and authors of Sourceforge.

  11. Re:Free Rider Problem; Tragedy of the Commons by David+Hume · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, minor issue though - SourceForge is owned by VA Software (LNUX on Nasdaq) who has reaped millions from their IPO. Sourceforge is no more open source than www.microsoft.com is.


    VA Software may be a for profit company, but SourceForge still "provid[es] free hosting to tens of thousands of projects." If that isn't sufficient to create a free rider problem and a bandwidth tragedy of the commons, nothing would.

    And while VA Software may have "reaped millions from their IPO," one may wonder where all of that money is now.

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