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FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge
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."
...already. Savannah moving over is certainly a big one, though.
Stuff like this is why we're continuing to optimize GForge's SQL...
The Army reading list
If you just need a good (and free) public CVS server, what other options are there besides sf and gforge?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I consider SourceForge to be representative of Open Source Software, and Savannah to be representative of Free Software.
It's amazing how accurately they seem to portray their respective ideologies.
May we never see th
"Shouldn't that be GNU/Forge?"
"I for one welcome our Gnu project management overlords"
"In Soviet Russia, projects manage gnu!"
Please help metamoderate.
This is probably uneducated on the matter, but I can understand why they want to move.
Frankly 4 months is way too long for the site to be "not completely functional" and it can't help but make you doubt the quality of the administration of the site if there weren't sufficient provisions in place for this eventuality. Any website is a target so any webadmin should have a plan in place.
When there are seemingly more secure options out there, more reliable anyway, then you'd go with them. Being faithful is one thing, but you can only do that for so long.
Seems like Stallman has lost sight of his roots!
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.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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
I don't have time to discuss this further. I am in the hospital and falling behind on my other work.
He's in hospital? Nothing serious, I hope.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Let everyone hope that Richard Stallman gets well soon.
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
Windows: Years in the making, hacked every day, still not working.
It sounds like a total of two people are questioning this decision, which is a small number given how many people use savannah. I have rarely seen a controversy about GNU end so quickly - there were a total of about ten messages in the thread. There is always someone for whom any change is a big tragedy.
As to losing track of roots, maybe RMS is getting a little bit more pragmatic in his old age. It's all very well and good to say "we should do X" when you have the resources to do X, but if you don't have the resources to do X, then saying "we should do X" is just stupid.
1) Savannah is insecure.
2) GForce is nice.
3) VA advertises SourceForge as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. Go look at their website for yourself if you don't believe it. They're not even bashful about it. I'm not surprised people are leaving it in droves, if not for sucking, but for the fact they're (the developers) are getting dicked as well.
GForge doesn't actually host projects (besides its own). It is simply a software package used to maintain and coordinate development efforts. If/when the FSF switches to GForge, it will be up to them to provide the resources necessary to handle the large amounts of traffic and projects. That responsibility does not fall on GForge.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
What's so wrong with using the techinical tools for outsourcing. If you don't like this trend, I understand you. But the best way to fight IMHO is to promote a law that requires paying the US (or watever country's corporation is outsourcing) minimal wages to the workers in India, Russia, etc. This will not allow them (us) compete only on price.
The very next words I quoted said, "according to Richard Stallman". Well, I guess you see that as him throwing his hands up in the air and giving up. You don't know Stallman very well, do you? If you recognized the way RMS works, you'd know that on religious differences like this, he is very pedantic and doesn't stop.
I mean, read the following made up quote to realize that I'm right: "The decision to move to MS IIS was made by Bradley Kuhn and the system adminitrators, according to Richard Stallman. They considered Apache could not be made secure enough."
Sure, this comparison isn't exactly valid because GForge is GPL'd and Apache is way more secure than IIS, but Richard "St. Ignucius" Stallman's brain is not wired like most people's, and believe me, he has veto power on all religious issues.
Sourceforge, also code named Alexandria. Original concept of a public development and collaboration for Open Source Projects. Last code base available was about 2000 before VA took the project Closed source for commercial purposes.
Savannah: Fork of Alexandria code for GNU projects. I evaluated it but it was too kludgy to understand.
GForge: Fork of Alexandria code by former Sourceforge developer. Rips out foundries and is for optimized PHP and Postgresql and Apache. Patches for Oracle in beta, refuses mysql patches.
Novell Forge: Fork of XoopsForge that uses LDAP and Novell directory server. Needs Xoops 2.0 to run.
XoopsForge: Fork of Alexandria that runs as a module in Xoops. Not much Dev activity, most dev in Novell Forge.
MyXoopsForge: Fork of XoopsForge that has some active development. Used for forge.xoops.org
The only thing that may compete in the same space that is somewhat similar is PHPGroupWare.
-Electrawn
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.
Here is a more comprehensive quote:
Savannah is lesser used -- there are fewer adherents of Free Software than Open Source.
The Open Source stance (as exemplified by ESR) is a more pragmatic one than an ideological one -- that people should use Open Source rather than Free Software because it *works better* than closed source, not because of a moral or philosophical mandate. The primary issue that SourceForge detractors bring up is that the current codebase is not available; this is an issue to a number of people strongly ideologically aligned with Free software, who want to interact with nothing but Free software. There is a parallel here. Since SF costs nothing, works well, and helps spread and facilitate open source software, there are few pragmatic issues with SourceForge that Savannah solves. Thus, the issues with Open Source that Free advocates have are mostly the same complaints that are raised about SourceForge.
Savannah's main issues are caused by a lack of people working on it, and it is currently less ready-to-go than SourceForge. It's HURD and Linux in a mirror.
Savannah makes its feelings on the importance of Free software very clear with the nongnu and gnu names. The SF people don't particularly place a lot of emphasis on someone being associated with a project or having a particular license -- there's no sourceforge.sortaopen.net for BSD-licensed projects, for instance.
Finally, while this is more germane to this story than to SF in general, the politics in the linked-to story remind me a good deal of the complex and never-ending debates about Free software purity that come up more frequently in the Free Software world.
I suppose that a lot of Free advocates are going to view this as a bit flamish -- I guess it's a bit cutting in that it identifies that Savannah hasn't been operating as well as SourceForge, but I don't feel that it's particularly false or misleading.
I use the GNU utilities as well as Apache every day -- I like both chunks of software.
I also, as people who read my posts frequently know, tend to often feel a bit frusterated with Free advocates. I do, not infrequently, think that Free folks can come off as a bit too rabid to the general public -- this mainly becomes an issue when media, desperate for some kind of figurehead for the open source world, settle on RMS, and he propagates his (intimidating to a CTO) views on intellectual property. I also remember when the Crystal Space team (an excellent LGPLed 3d engine), wanted to be absolutely correct WRT the GPL and valuing Stallman's input, wrote him to ask for a bit of clarification on a licensing detail. Stallman's response, an enlightening read, highlights a good deal of what I consider the difference between Open Source folks like Jorrit and Free folks like Stallman.
May we never see th
I understand your point. I too don't like it when somebody complains about a good or service that is provided free or at below cost.
However, the post to which you are responding may also have a point. The free rider problem and the tragedy of the commons (or, perhaps more precisely, tragedy of the net-commons) are inherent and endemic problems with Open Source software and projects.
Let's face it, Open Source projects are classically Marxist -- i.e., To each according to their needs, from each according to their ability. I'm not saying that to red-bait. On the contrary, I think it is kind of nice.
Which I guess is my way of saying that, given these problems, I'm always surprised when people are surprised when an Open Source or Free Software project is over-burdenend and/or under-supported.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I could be, but who uses slashcode? If you want blogging software you can use Moveabletype or livejournal.com / greatestjournal.com .
Oh? Slashdot a news site? Sorry. Xoops for Mission Critical stuff, Php-nuke, Post Nuke and any derivatives, tikiwiki or some other CMS derivative.
No one cares about Slashcode because no one uses it other than Slashdot.
-Electrawn
There are two reasons this decision is somewhat controversial for those of us maintaining FSF-related projects:
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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's unfortunate, because the code is insecure as hell.
u e& file=source.php
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=tr
Nice, eh?
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
This would seem to be more a function of how *PHP* on the gforge server is setup. If register_globals is on, this will happen, if register_globals is off, which it is by default in the recent (read at least 1 year or more) stock php tarballs, this would not occur.
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.
P.S. I am not in the outsourcing business right now,quit it 2 years ago, but it is still setting the compensation levels for software engineers here.
I have always felt that, rather than having a single mass community site, like a master sourceforge or Savannah site, where most projects congregate, it would be much better to have a lot of little "xforge" sites scattered about and that can then be more specialized to the needs of different groups and projects over time; that individual universities, companies, and even individual project maintainers, could easily setup and deploy locally or through common hosting services; and then to have specialized master search or index sites that could locate and aggregate projects easily from remote xforge's...
The problem of the single Sourceforge site or Savannah site is that it is a single point of failure. Many projects will be down if sourceforge or Savannah, for example, are down for extended periods of time. Having smaller project sites will at least mean failures will be far more localized and far less disruptive to the community as a whole.
The problem in the original sourceforge code is that it was impossible to easily customize or deploy, and this remained fairly true even after the heavy hacking done on the Savannah branch. If gforge has finally solved this problem, and makes it relatively easy to deploy xforge-like sites, then I see this as a very promising development indeed.
Incredible, it's the same exact example that i found by following the link in the article.a h-hackers/ 2004-04/msg00191.html
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/savann
You must be its author!
Of course the ultimate solution to this particular "problem" is to use $_GET, $_POST, or $_REQUEST, instead of relying on register_globals, and in the case of source.php that would be what, a 2 minute fix?
> what's the GForge license?
GPL.
The Army reading list
Since when has the "community" been restricted to citizens of the USA only? In case you missed it, the USA has been siphoning jobs and people away from the rest of the world for DECADES now. But I guess when it is India losing people to the USA everything is fine, hmm?
Why? No seriously, I wouldn't support a project once I encounter this kind of attitude. People often go "Well, it's their project so they have the final say about it.", which is bullshit. If you're going to start your own OS project and be a complete jackass to people who use it, ( In short, your developers, bugtesters, QA people, support staff AND users all in one. ) then DO NOT START A DAMNED OS PROJECT. Look what's happening to Xfree86 for example; they went anal about licensing and voila, the OS community gave them the collective middle finger and it's highly likely that in a few years time Xfree86 wil be nothing more then an interesting little footnote in computing history. Remember people, don't just open your source, alos open your mind. And for the love of Eris, get rid of that crap "No matter how fucked up/lacking things are, my will be done. Infidel." attitude.
On a slightly different note, doesn't this whole idea about SF, one of the flagships of the OS community, is actually closed source and used to promote offshore outsourcing seem painfully ironic? Especially when one considers Slashdot is actually part of VA Software? Don't you subscribers love to know that your hard-earned money might one day be used to A) buy these people a penis extension on four wheels with an engine and B) fire this guy and replace him with Deeptendu Chakrapani from Bangladesh? At least the spelling will improve, though...
Hate me!
From the gforge faq, on why it doesn't support Mysql (see http://gforge.org/docman/view.php/1/24/faq.html)
"You could do it, but why bother? To quote Tim Perdue - "GForge could not be made to run on the primitive MySQL database without serious hacking, and I won't accept those kinds of changes back into the system. For the amount of work involved in such a project, you'd be better off taking an hour to learn postgres. It's a superior database in every way, with the only point of debate being speed on simple 'hello world' type applications".
It'd be a lot of work because:
1. GForge uses Postgres stored procedures, so you'd have to convert those into PHP functions
2. GForge uses Postgres functions like pg_connect, so you'd have to replace those with the MySQL equivalents
3. GForge uses subselects, so you'd have to rewrite those to use temporary tables or whatever (MySQL 4.1 supports subselects, so once it becomes production-ready, this won't be a barrier anymore)
"
So what they are telling me is that this thing is hard coded around PG specific routines..... That's NOT a good thing, I don't care what they think about Mysql (ditto applies to DB2, SapDB (Now MaxDB), Informix or Sybase).
Someone call me when these guys get a clue.
Bugs Bunny was right.
I can't address your "other reasons" because you don't specify what they are. I can, however, address the issue of "scarcity."
Scarcity still exists. With regard to Source Forge, bandwidth is limited and still costs money. With regard to Open Source and Free Software projects, the great and continuing scacity is that of time.
How do you want to spend your time? Playing with your children? Helping them with their homework? With you wife? Working for money?
Or working on an Open Source or Free software project that many people will download and use without making compensation or making a contribution? If the latter, I thank you, and I mean that sincerely. However, the problem of scarcity -- the scarcity of your time -- remains.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I might take that as a valid comparison if either gcc or the Internet were proprietary products explicitly advertised as being tools for shipping work overseas.
DNA just wants to be free...