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New Apache Allura Project For Project Development Hosting

Posted by Soulskill on from the new-and-shiny dept.

New submitter brondsem writes: "Today the Apache Software Foundation announced the Allura project for hosting software development projects. Think GitHub or SourceForge on your own servers — Allura has git, svn, hg, wiki, tickets, forums, news, etc. It's written in python and has a modular and extensible platform so you can write your own tools and extensions. It's already used by SourceForge, DARPA, German Aerospace Center, and Open Source Projects Europe. Allura is open source; available under the Apache License v2.0. When you don't want all your project resources in the cloud on somebody else's walled garden, you can run Allura on your own servers and have full control and full data access." (SourceForge shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot).

43 comments

  1. Apache Allura by smittyoneeach · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apache Allura
    Hot as Uhura
    Whose legs a fine sheen
    Good soap will assure-a
    Burma Shave

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    1. Re:Apache Allura by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1

      You had my attention at "Uhura".

      The "legs a fine sheen" are simply cruel to mention...

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Apache Allura by smittyoneeach · · Score: 2

      Well, I had to work in a shaving connection in a tight, tight space. While keeping everything family friendly.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    3. Re:Apache Allura by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1

      I am no longer "family friendly" thinkin' bout that ladies legs!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    4. Re:Apache Allura by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

      Those thoughts are how families get made.

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  2. Fuck beta! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    (SourceForge shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot).

    And ruining both with extreme prejudice.

    1. Re:Fuck beta! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      yep I wonder if Allura betas suck as much as slashdot beta?

    2. Re:Fuck beta! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Don't be too hard on them. SourceForge has sucked for about 10 years, so it's not the current overlord's fault...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Fuck beta! by HiThere · · Score: 1

      SourceForge did not in the past cause you to download advertisements with your software. I understand that's current practice. (If I'm wrong, please advise.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    4. Re:Fuck beta! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      SourceForge started bundling crapware with downloads under the last overlords. They're flailing around trying to find a business model. GitHub has one (design a decent service, give it away free to hippies, sell it to people with money), SourceForge never did, and can't have the same one (would you pay for SourceForge?).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. (plus one InformatiDve) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    to get so8e eye

    1. Re:(plus one InformatiDve) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The typos in those goat.cx spams are so weird that I'm wondering if they're hiding secret messages.

    2. Re:(plus one InformatiDve) by lucm · · Score: 1

      Those links are posted by the Praetorians and hide a secret portal leading to a mysterious backdoor. Thanks to CyberBob, I know how it works: hold the left shift key on your keyboard then click directly in the middle of the top loop of the "8". If you do it correctly, you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.

      Be careful.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:(plus one InformatiDve) by stoborrobots · · Score: 1

      ... you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.

      /me sees what you did there...

      --
      "Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
    4. Re:(plus one InformatiDve) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      to get so8e eye

      I miss the good old days of slashdot where [goat.cx] didn't appear. The surprise was always very entertaining.

  4. 5 comments and the site is already slashdotted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Makes me wonder if it's up to even the modest demands of my project.

  5. Self hosted, cool... by Atl+Rob · · Score: 1

    "The Allura project is self-hosted on an instance of Allura" What a deal!

  6. This is very bad for OSS by bazmail · · Score: -1

    This project, counter-intuitively, damages open source as it fragments the OSS ecosystem as there will just be more places to search to find a piece of code or a project. It will also lead to more projects spaces being abandoned as people hop from one provider to the next (or even their own). Without the existence of a federated register or search it will bring about a kind of OSS Heat Death

    1. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You're not thinking big enough because if you were, you'd realize that in the bigger scheme of things, applications like this will allow people to have their own GitHubs / SourceForges. Just imagine that...At first, it might be counter-intuitive, but in the long run, it will only add to it at exponential levels.

    2. Re:This is very bad for OSS by lucm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People who want to store their own projects on their own servers instead of having Crapware bundled with their downloads on SourceForge or who don't like the tedious process of publishing on Github can use this thing and SEO or twitter their way to the mainstream search engines - or maybe they just want to use it internally and don't care about people knowing about their stuff.

      As for a federated register, if we look at the existing models (Wikipedia, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) then THAT is the end of OSS. When a small clique decides what is acceptable and what is not then the outcome looks good but that's just because the people or projects that are crushed are lost in the background noise.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You mean you want a centralized registry? You mean like Freshmeat (aka Freecode)?

      Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.

      If you want OSS to thrive, you want people eat their own dog food. They need to run their own servers, host their own projects, and in general stop being pansies too afraid to run a web server. A VPS is like $15/month these days. And you can also find good deals for 1U co-location for less than $100/month.

    4. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it hurts open source because it's an ugly, disorganized, slapped together clone of a popular commercial product. It's helping lend credence many of the annoying open source stereotypes.

    5. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A VPS is like $15/month these days. And you can also find good deals for 1U co-location for less than $100/month.

      And once the author loses interest in the project they stop paying to host it and it goes away.

    6. Re:This is very bad for OSS by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      I doubt anyone will appear as a github/sourceforge competitor using this. What they will use it for, and should be encouraged, is to host their own projects internally as a competitor to crap like sharepoint. Local dev teams in companies that need to manage their own software need this kind of thing (or one of the many competitor projects)

    7. Re:This is very bad for OSS by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      blablbablblablbalbla.

      this does nothing for that.. this is just gitlab(self hosted free github like) competitor.

      codeplex etc holes do what you mention.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    8. Re:This is very bad for OSS by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.

      I'm not sure it will. SourceForge had a confusing business model that included selling ads and bundling crapware. GitHub's model is quite simple: they sell project hosting. The open-source-hosting GitHub site is just an advert. Their business model relies on people using their free product, becoming familiar with it, and advocating it within their organisations. If they start doing the same sorts of things to their UI that SourceForge did then their revenue stream dries up.

      A VPS is like $15/month these days.

      There are also quite a few OSS-friendly VPS companies (not surprising, since they're mostly using infrastructure built entirely from OSS) that will either give big discounts or free VMs to open source developers.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    9. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Mdk754 · · Score: 1

      Agreed... and this looks like a sloppy gitlab copycat at that. Curious to see how it evolves, however.

      For now I'll stick with my private gitlab server, thanks.

    10. Re:This is very bad for OSS by deKernel · · Score: 1

      This is exactly what I was thinking. I see the potential here because if devs/engineers at a company pick this then they will more than likely push back any fixes/enhancements to the project.

    11. Re:This is very bad for OSS by Wootery · · Score: 1

      It's worth noting that this is already possible today.

      The only question is whether Allura will be game-changingly good at what it sets out to do.

      (Also, I agree that this is a Good Thing overall. What we see today is a GitHub monoculture.)

  7. GitLab Already Exists by terbeaux · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is pretty nice too: https://www.gitlab.com/

    1. Re:GitLab Already Exists by smartr · · Score: 0

      Or you could try Atlassian Stash:
      https://www.atlassian.com/soft... ...
      Or, like me, you see the term "Apache Software" and get drunk on the beer.

    2. Re:GitLab Already Exists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And people criticize Canonical for NIH syndrome whenever they do anything.

    3. Re:GitLab Already Exists by jrumney · · Score: 1

      As does Apache Bloodhound. Why do we need so many open source projects for managing open source projects?

    4. Re:GitLab Already Exists by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2

      or Redmine which is the 'de-facto' project management portal application and completely free - not borked by some paid-for 'upgrade' tiers.

    5. Re:GitLab Already Exists by Raumkraut · · Score: 2

      I like Redmine, I do, but it has no support for actually being a source control server. On its own, browsing local repositories is all you get.

    6. Re:GitLab Already Exists by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      nor do any of these, they're all management front ends for other SCMs like git or SVN.

  8. Nonsense by dwheeler · · Score: 1

    This makes no sense. If you want to search for code, the obvious way to do it today is use Google or some other search engine. Tomorrow, the obvious way to do it... will be to use Google or some other search engine. You don't need a "federated search", you just need a good search engine. There are a number of code-specific search engines that already work today too, again, there's no need for one system to rule them all.

    I think there's great advantage in having an OSS management system for managing OSS projects.

    --
    - David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
  9. Time for some VM infrastructure by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

    Just happened to post this on G+ this morning:

    When Sourceforge and similar sites first came online they were offering a service that was hard to duplicate locally for most open source development teams.

    Today the equivalent would be offering virtual machine instances running complex application frameworks, probably deployed with a set of puppet modules maintained by the development team and also offered for download. That's the "missing infrastructure" in 2014.ï

    I was just looking at a web project an hour ago that has some annoying bugs that I can probably fix easily enough, but it's reported to take days to weeks to get an instance of it running, and even if I managed to do so it would be because I have the infrastructure to spin up a few new VM's, which not everybody has. That's serious friction for gaining contributions. I figure the patch itself will take about four hours to complete and test.

    I'd love to go to some site, click on 'deploy new foobar server' and have it return to me some sudo-blessed user@ credentials, with the source already checked out in git with everything running and ready to tweak, test, and commit. Clean commit trees and inactivity could easily be used as a metric to dispose of the COW-diffs file for the VM, since making a new one would be just as straightforward.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    1. Re:Time for some VM infrastructure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      God dammit can people *stop* with the stupid metaphors polluting the terminology of the industry! "Hey if you want to roll your own patch you can just spin up a couple of vms if you're rocking enough horsepower!"

      I'm not sure *why* people use idiotic terminology like that but it's more useless jargon that creates yet another pointless barrier to entry. It doesn't sound cool, it sounds stupid and an attempt to be elitist. Do people *actually* not realize they sound like complete douches when they talk like that?

    2. Re:Time for some VM infrastructure by exomondo · · Score: 1

      You missed Surfing the Internet was ultimately Surfing the Internet ;)

    3. Re:Time for some VM infrastructure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As far as I can tell, you are upset about GPP using the phrase 'spin up' to describe the process of instantiating a new virtual machine. Somehow, that turned into a rant that covered a lot of phrases that the GPP didn't actually use. And then a complaint about elitist, idiomatic terminology that will frighten people. Unlike the word 'instantiate.' That word comes up in conversation all the time, and people just love it.

  10. Less mature than it's revision number suggests by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Allura is promising but it's a pre-1.0 beta. This is one to watch, because we really need something with lower TCO than GitLab or Gitorious. But those wanting a free lunch should beware the sharp edges. Give it a whirl with Vagrant and see for yourself how well it does (or doesn't) spin up. This also looks like it could devolve into Python Package Hell with some help from Java (for Solr) rolled in for good measure. So far it's not too bad. Hopefully with a clear focus they can keep the complexity a bit tamer than some other Apache projects have.

  11. Princess Allura by Atmosphereum · · Score: 0

    Allura brings software projects together like Voltron! (To the three or four Slashdotters who don't already know, Princess Allura pilots Blue Lion, which forms the right leg of Lion Force Voltron.)