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Debian Software

Debian's Own SourceForge 132

Posted by timothy from the join-us-now-and-free-the-software dept.
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!"
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Debian's Own SourceForge More

Debian's Own SourceForge

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  • Good to see (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jazir1979 ( 637570 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:24AM (#5630225)
    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"?

    • Re:Good to see (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Does anybody know if there are other sourceforge installations that dedicate themselves to some specific "sub-genre"?

      Like Savannah? [gnu.org]

    • Re:Good to see (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jsse ( 254124 )
      Does anybody know if there are other sourceforge installations that dedicate themselves to some specific "sub-genre"?

      apt-get install sourceforge

      Whoa! There you go. Whatever you like it to be? :)

      Just kidding. It's very much depending on what sub-genre you'd like, and approach those who'd most likely sponsor it. Whatever it is, your sponsor must have huge resources at his disposal. May be given a trial on this big iron [ibm.com] to start with?

    • Re:Good to see (Score:3, Informative)

      by nsebban ( 513339 )
      There are several foundries [sourceforge.net] available (3D, BASIC, Clustering, Databases, Distributed Computing, Español, Gaming, GNOME, Java, Linux Drivers, Linux Kernel, Linux on Large Systems, Perl, PHP, Python, Russian, Storage, Tcl, Vector Graphics).
    • German speakers...? It is in English too, though - http://developer.berlios.de/

  • Will the standardization effort... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:26AM (#5630231) Homepage Journal
    ...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... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by krmt ( 91422 ) <therefrmhere AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:29AM (#5630364) Homepage
      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.
    • ..., but the benefits of a variety of different platforms are lost on the newbie

      On the other hand, the real newbie (the one that is intimidated by the huge amounts of different projects on SourceForge) now has a place where he can easily find the Debian-specific packages he wants. It would enhance the newbie-friendliness of Debian.

  • This is good news! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peerogue ( 623472 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:37AM (#5630261)
    It's good to see that Raphael Hertzog explicitly mentions that Alioth will be reserved to Debian-specific artefacts. At first, I feared that it would be an alternate repository of all the deliverables, including the Debian-packaged distributions. Now that would have been a terrible mistake (duplication, maintenance nightmare, ease of code forking, etc...).

    I think it's a good idea to have it separated from Sourceforge. Although it will require dedicated hardware, maintenance, the Sourceforge site is not meant to host distribution-specific bits. At least it's my understanding.

    I don't know why most of the comments posted so far are so negative about it. Congratulations to Raphael Hertzog for setting this up. I'm sure it required lots of hours of hard work and discussions.

  • Sourceforge? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:39AM (#5630268)
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by krmt ( 91422 ) <therefrmhere AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:08AM (#5630321) Homepage
      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.
      • You can also use the standard Debian Bug Tracking System

        IMO, Debbugs [debian.org] isn't that great either. Its major problem from my POV is the read-only web gui. Considering one of the projects on the new SF site is a GNOME front end for the BTS [debian.org], I'm obviously not the only one discontent with Debbugs.

        Personally I find Bugzilla [bugzilla.org] far superior to Debbugs as well as the SF BTS, but the lack of an e-mail interface to Bugzilla is apparently keeping it from replacing Debbugs.

        I know complaining is easy and helping out

        • I have dealt with this exact issue ever since I got on SF's sales call list.

          Every time they call me I ask "do you have automated build & test integration yet?" and a dozen other questions.

          They have a ton of features, and the new document management and searching sounds nice. That would help us merge VSS and CVS, but unfortunately loses the drag & drop niceness of VSS (java 1.4 applet anyone?).

          The biggest hurt for us remains bug resolution and quality control. None of the above mentioned products

    • Re:Sourceforge? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pork_spies ( 659663 )
      I think SF is brilliant, especially because it is free. Somebody really is paying for me to develop free software when I use it.

      I am always a little worried though that it is a relic of the bubble era and will collapse, removing access to all the sources etc.

    • Re:Sourceforge? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Khalid ( 31037 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:44AM (#5630577) Homepage
      SF has been a wonderful gift to the FOS community and still is, but it's interface really sucks badly. It's very difficult to search the archives for instance which is one of the most important things in my opinion. I want to find easily if someone has had the same problem and how he has solved it and this is very difficult in SF. VA have concentrated all their efforts on the entreprise version and haven't updated sf.net for two or three years. Now there is some hope Tim Purdue one of the guys behind SF has reinitiated the GPL branch http://gforge.org/ and has integrated some patchs from the Debian branch and it looks quite promising.
      • I can tell you that there were people who got totally stumped trying to download my project from SourceForge. Yeah. The UI definitely needs work.

        -uso.
        In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU! *g*
      • As someone who hacks on GForge (and on debian-sf, what the debian one runs) the projects have merged, with debian-sf being the stable branch, and GForge just going into beta now.

    • Re:Sourceforge? (Score:2, Informative)

      by tcopeland ( 32225 )

      Got suggestions? Head on over to GForge [gforge.org] and send 'em in... also, what do you think of the GForge default theme?

      Yours,

      Tom

  • Gah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:48AM (#5630283) Journal
    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!!

  • Hosted by ??? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Compuser ( 14899 )
    Just idle wondering [see subject].
    • Netcraft [netcraft.com] its TERENA Secretariat whoever they are.
    • $ host alioth.debian.org
      alioth.debian.org A 192.87.30.200

      $ whois 192.87.30.200
      SURFnet BV EJBNET (NET-192-87-0-0-1)
      192.87.0.0 - 192.87.255.255
      TERENA Secretariat TERENA (NET-192-87-30-0-1)
      192.87.30.0 - 192.87.30.255

      Seems to be some "terana group"
      Confirmation with
      $ traceroute alioth.debian.org

      In your favorite browser: http://www.google.fr/search?q=terena [google.fr]
      where you'll learn that terana is Trans European Research and Educational Networking Association.
      • Do you know anything about TERENA finances?
        Basically, I wonder if this sourceforge is a
        more reliable long-term site than sf.net hosted
        by a commercial company with moderately shaky
        finances.

  • My developments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trotski ( 592530 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:06AM (#5630319)
    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!

  • Nerd shit: origins of the name Alioth (Score:5, Informative)

    by scubacuda ( 411898 ) <scubacuda AT gmail DOT com> on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:24AM (#5630354)
    For what it's worth [uiuc.edu]...

    ...
    Alioth [winshop.com.au] is another name for Epsilon Ursae Majoris [glyphweb.com].

    The graceful curve of handle of the Big Dipper [uiuc.edu] (the Plough in Great Britain), among the most famed of celestial sights, represents the tail of Ursa Major [uiuc.edu], 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 [uiuc.edu], which took on the vaguely similar name "Alcor [uiuc.edu]." 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 [uiuc.edu]). 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.

  • FreeBSD's own SourceForge ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @05:44AM (#5630385)
    After seeing this article, I wondered, why doesn't the FreeBSD project do something similar ? There is a lot of FreeBSD-related projects [freebsd.org] that would be better off being hosted in a centralised place, with all their mailing lists and forums. That would make following their progress so much more easier...
  • This is an awsome thing. I know I can't program worth a lick besides making a simple graphical text based adventure game on the apple 2 basic, but when I did do that I was overshooting my teacher (7th grade). However, now that my mind was infected with goto's and if/thens, I just can't understand subroutines and such.

    Anywho, on to my real point - quite a few times i've been in the situation where I saw some very left minded people programming, and not knowing much about what they were doing - I could 'v

  • I think this is bad (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chatterton ( 228704 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:06AM (#5630431) Homepage
    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 [sourceforge.net], then Savannah [gnu.org], then Alioth [debian.org], 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 [google.com] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cjwatson ( 224090 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @06:35AM (#5630476) Homepage
      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.)

    • Check this out! (Score:4, Informative)

      by entrigant ( 233266 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:53AM (#5630598)
      www.freshmeat.net - Your new central hub. :D

    • Re:I think this is bad (Score:2, Interesting)

      by camh ( 32881 )
      When I look for a project, I just type "fm project_name" into mozilla, where I have "fm" set up as a shortcut to search freshmeat. 99% of the time, it comes back with the project (it's probably 100% really, but you can't be too sure).
    • OTOH, any centralization creates a single point of failure. I've been increasingly worried as SourceForge has become more dominant. Yes, there are good reasons. Yes, the contents are all Open Source, and probably also Free Source. This lessens the degree of vulnerability. But it doesn't remove it. If SourceForge disappeared (or was acquired, and taken closed) tomorrow, we would be years in recovering from it.

      Even here the code is duplicated, meaning that a hole in one is a hole in both (all). But th
    • "Sourceforge is my principal source of informations when I search for a project that do what I need to do."

      When did the sourceforge search engine start working?

  • So... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...projects hosted there are guaranteed to enter the debian distribution w/o any of these debian is-it-legal-? discussions?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Sourceforge / Savannah / Debian SF/ GForge HUH? (Score:5, Informative)

      by capedgirardeau ( 531367 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @07:49AM (#5630588)
      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

      • GForge is definitely the "main line" of SourceForge development now... with many new features, including nascent SOAP support, better task management, and an active development community, it's definitely worth a look-see if you need a project management tool.

        Here's the GForge install I support - CougaarForge [cougaar.org].

        Yours,

        Tom

      • Gforge forgoes the most difficult aspect of sourceforge which is providing shell and CVS access (which means no LDAP integration either). OTOH it does add some neat features like gantt charts.
        • Hmmm.... I'm not sure what you mean. GForge does support CVS access (albeit via a series of cron jobs that create the repositories and CVSROOT/readers files and such) and LDAP integration (although I've never used it since storing user info in the database works fine).

          The above sentence is not a LISP expression, although it comes close.

          Yours,

          Tom
          • In the original sourceforge when you sign up as a developer you can log into the box because the authentication is via LDAP. This allows you to log into cvs using ssh.

            IIRC gforge does not do this for you. You need to manually create accounts for your CVS users. Also according to Tim Purdue the LDAP code is still untested.

            It seems like it ought to be possible to use pam_pgsql though.

      • 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.

        I'm not a Savannah developer, just someone who has a project hosted by savannah, but I've been impressed with them so far. Savannah may be based on SF 2.5 (I don't know) but I have seen many bugfixes, and some very useful improvements recently, like searchable mailing list archives. The developers are busy of course, but they at

    • Debian sourceforge is a site for the development of Debian packages, based on the Debian Sourceforge code, a fork of the official GPL sourceforge. It provides CVS, bug trackers, etc. It is intetended for use only by Debian developers. Users can still get packages however they want, from packages.debian.org or from apt-get.

      Gforge is a separate fork of the Sourceforge code, also based on the last GPL'd version.

  • Debian rocks (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And now we needa freshmeat for debian related cool stuff!

    It could be calle,d freshveg for all your potatoe needs!

    • And now we needa freshmeat for debian related cool stuff!

      We already have several of those.

      I do like the idea of alioth though. Having a dedicated place for Debian's own home grown tools will definately help development. It might even help other distros import and use some of these tools.

      It must be hard for people using other distros that don't have alternatives, automatic dependancy resolution, package configuration (debconf), and sta

  • ... I thought it read "Debian 0wn3d Sourceforge."
    ;)

  • G-Forge (Score:1)

    by rawg ( 23000 )
    I would have thought that they would use G-Forge. Wow.
  • When will people learn that there's a lot in a name? :)

    Using a not so memorable and hard to spell name is annoying as it's hard to associate that site with what its function is.

    Personally I would have called it something catchy like debsource, debelopment, debresource etc..
    • But it's not for the general public, it's for Debian developers. Why would they want some catchy name when they can use a cool-sounding one? In any event, it sounds better than cvs.debian.org.

  • I don't like this. The more we steer toward developing software that is intended to run exclusively on a specific Linux package like Debian, the less general compatability and more partitions in what the world is now beginning to know as "Linux" will be created and perpetuated, and that will hurt the pursuit of larger marketshare and acceptance to the masses.

    For example, it really pisses me off that Windows XP dropped support for new software running on old Windows versions, and even worse, vice versa wi
  • This is probably entirely coincidental, but in Hebrew, an "Alia" means "a coming up" or "a going up" -- as in servers or websites, but also as in going uphill, or prices going up, etc. "Alioth" is the plural. And this is a very fitting name for a place where people can upload software...

    Thought you'd like to know.

  • ok i went to alioth.debian.org registered, username, password, etc. they mailed me a link to login can't login with the username i had so i tried to have them send me my password says there is no "username" so i try to reregister, with same 'username" maybe it didn't go through the first time. tells me that there is already the same username taken. has anyone else had this problem? has anyone been able to login to the website?

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