Slashdot Mirror
New Apache Allura Project For Project Development Hosting
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).
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
"The Allura project is self-hosted on an instance of Allura" What a deal!
It is pretty nice too: https://www.gitlab.com/
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 $100/month.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Just happened to post this on G+ this morning:
I was just looking at a web project an hour ago that has some annoying bugs that I can probably fix easily enough, but it's reported to take days to weeks to get an instance of it running, and even if I managed to do so it would be because I have the infrastructure to spin up a few new VM's, which not everybody has. That's serious friction for gaining contributions. I figure the patch itself will take about four hours to complete and test.
I'd love to go to some site, click on 'deploy new foobar server' and have it return to me some sudo-blessed user@ credentials, with the source already checked out in git with everything running and ready to tweak, test, and commit. Clean commit trees and inactivity could easily be used as a metric to dispose of the COW-diffs file for the VM, since making a new one would be just as straightforward.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
yep I wonder if Allura betas suck as much as slashdot beta?
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)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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