FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge 208
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."
There are some pretty big sites running GForge... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stuff like this is why we're continuing to optimize GForge's SQL [rubyforge.org]...
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:2)
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:2)
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:3, Funny)
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/savann
You must be its author!
Come on, it's FSF we are talking about (Score:2)
Re:There are some pretty big sites running GForge. (Score:5, Interesting)
good news! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you just need a good (and free) public CVS server, what other options are there besides sf and gforge?
Re:good news! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good news! (Score:3, Interesting)
Although SourceForge will be much faster now that PlayFair has moved to Sarovar
No, but seriously, folks. If the top 10 projects [sourceforge.net] moved off of SourceForge, I bet that'd eliminate 75% of the load. eMule alone gets downloaded a quarter-million times a day...
Re:good news! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:good news! (Score:3, Interesting)
Free Rider Problem; Tragedy of the Commons (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [stanford.edu] and the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] (or, perhaps more precisely, tragedy of the net-commons [forbes.com]) 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Free Rider Problem; Tragedy of the Commons (Score:4, Interesting)
VA Software may be a for profit company, but SourceForge still "provid[es] free hosting to tens of thousands of projects [sourceforge.net]." 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.
Re:Marxism is irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
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, ban
Re:Free Rider Problem; Tragedy of the Commons (Score:2)
I think that Open Source software has made tremendous strides and made great contributions. But it is perfectly possible that it has done so despite obvious free rider problems.
People have been charitable for tho
VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourcing. (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 [vasoftware.com]
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:2, Interesting)
Time for IWW? (Score:2)
Or, if not a law, maybe an international union of some sort.
Re:Time for IWW? (Score:2, Insightful)
P.S. I am not in the outsourcing business right now,quit it 2 years ago, but it is still set
Re:Time for IWW? (Score:2)
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:2)
Another tool that's helping companies "ship jobs overseas" is Linux. gcc is a big help in these endeavors, as well.
Oh, and don't forget about the Internet.
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:2)
I've never heard of such a thing. Links please.
Re:VA is pimping SourceForge as tool for outsourci (Score:2)
Re:good news! (Score:5, Insightful)
and now PBS-style appeals for money on the front page.
God Im gonna get flamed for this.
Anyways, maybe its not such a bad idea if Sourceforge required paid membership (like $50 a year) for file and cvs access. Seriously, I'd pay if the moneys right for better service and quicker file and cvs access.
Re:good news! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can understand them providing additional services, like POP3 email access @sourceforge rather than just email forwarding, or something like that, for money. However, if SF tries doing something like this, they are, simply and plainly, going to go away.
Re:good news! (Score:2)
and all that work goes down in a big noisy way.
I would imagine that someone might have a current copy of a Free software project's source handy.
There aren't all that many servers out there offering free space in CVS for projects. At least being a cvs server, you don't have to give up any rights to use it.
Re:good news! (Score:4, Funny)
That's what I call a feature.
thankya, I'll be here all week.
Open Source/Free Software (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amazing how accurately they seem to portray their respective ideologies.
Re:Open Source/Free Software (Score:2)
I am unclear how it is representative of open source.
It's not free software either.
This is one of the reasons that Tim Perdue created gforge incidentally.
Phil
Re:Open Source/Free Software (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that Savannah was forked from the GPL-based Sourceforge...
Clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [sourceforge.net], an enlightening read, highlights a good deal of what I consider the difference between Open Source folks like Jorrit and Free folks like Stallman.
Re:Clarification (Score:3, Informative)
That's because the BSD license is 100% Free Software, with the imprimatur of Richard M. Stallman himself, and 100% Open Source Software, certified by the Notorius Public at OSI.
It is not "sortaopen", it is open!
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
Stallman's response [sourceforge.net], an enlightening read, highlights a good deal of what I consider the difference between Open Source folks like Jorrit and Free folks like Stallman.
That was quite a good link, explains the difference between Free and Open Source software extremely well.
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
SourceForge, for better or worse, creates an incredibly useful new service. The Savannah and GForge guys copy it, using (at least in the case of Savannah, don't know about GForge) SourceForge's code, GForge knocks off their name, and instead of showing a bit of appreciation, GNU issues a statement about how SourceForge is worse than Microsoft and everyone ought to switch.
Oh, and then Savannah turns out to be unusable an
Re:Clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you view that as a sort of paranoid approach?
I mean, sure, if GForge works as well as SF, then it might be a good choice. But slamming SF because you think that they're suddenly going to clamp down on all the data they ser
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
"has the freedom to write the GPLv3, with which GPL software by default can be automatically moved to."
Not quite true.
By default, if you put it under the GPL but do not specify a version number, you can use any version of the GPL you want to redistribute the software. If you put a version number then you can only redistribute it under that version of the GPL (like Linux). If you put a version number and "any later version" then you can also redistribute it under any GPL version that is greater than the o
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
Right. This is the case for almost all GPL software.
The problem is that if Jim Bob gets a copy of my source released "under the GPL, sans a version number", he can then also release it "under the GPL, sans a version number". This would include GPLv3. Thus, such a change would not affect nondistributed software, since there would be no opportunity to chan
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
Re:Clarification (Score:2)
Ok, lets get this out of the way (Score:2, Funny)
"Shouldn't that be GNU/Forge?"
"I for one welcome our Gnu project management overlords"
"In Soviet Russia, projects manage gnu!"
Odd mods (Score:2)
How was this redundant, when I posted it when there were 3 other comments? And how was it off-topic? Plenty of people thought it was funny...
I smell a new round of moderators shortly. Let's here it for metamoderation...
I can understand that. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
RMSs history on security (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like Stallman has lost sight of his roots!
Re:RMSs history on security (Score:5, Insightful)
or he's starting to show signs of being realistic.
Re:RMSs history on security (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. This is an increasing problem in our community - witness the GFDL debate. The RMS of old was wildly - some would say blindly - utopian. "No passwords", "Everyone can learn how to program", "It's possible to write a free operating system including compiler tools and editor".
We owe a lot of the results we've seen to that lovely, crazy optimism.
Sometimes you're wrong, of course, and get bitten - but sometimes you are very right. The success of the fre
Re:RMSs history on security (Score:3, Interesting)
What do Stallman's roots have to do with it? Do you expect him to wield supreme veto power over anything done by anyone at the FSF?
You're out of context, and way off (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:You're out of context, and way off (Score:2)
I can't imagine he'd sacrifice his health for this, though. That just wouldn't make sense.
The full quote sheds some light (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a more comprehensive quote:
Re:The full quote proves me right (Score:2)
In some ways, the Internet has improved our lives (access to por^H^H^Hinformation, access to por^H^H^Hcommunities of like-minded individuals previously unreachable, etc.), but in a lo
Subversion support? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Subversion support? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sourceforge is now a commercial product with commercial bugs. A perfect case study of what not to do with OSS code. No significant alternatives have appeared to challenge SourceForge other than Savannah. Considering the bandwidth costs I doubt any o
Re:Subversion support? (Score:3, Informative)
Subversion is so convenient and I also switched to subversion recently. Supporting subversion or Webdav may have many potential advantages in its flexible architecture. I hope webdav be integrated into Gforge into its next mainstream version.
Re:Subversion support? (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, it's DForge; Sung Kim is working on it. You can read his post about it here [contactor.se].
Re:Subversion support? (Score:2)
Another cool thing is that every project has a wiki set up for it. I think wikis are a great way to record FAQs and such for evolving projects.
Sung rocks!
Gforge is very specialized. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Gforge is very specialized. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gforge is very specialized. (Score:2, Interesting)
Compatibility vs. Speed. I don't like the fact Gforge is highly optimized for Postgres only. And in the Faq that they refuse to accept MySql patches. Thats pretty arrogant, but it's their project.
I like abstraction layers like ADODB or php PEAR. Either allows you to migrate from say MySql to Oracle or Postgres to DB2 with 1 or 2 PHP code chages. Moving the data is a different story, but it can be done.
-Electrawn
Re:Gforge is very specialized. (Score:4, Informative)
> to accept MySql patches
It's not that simple. It'd be a fair bit of work to port GForge to MySQL, and for what gain? PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] is fast, stable, and open source. And targeting PostgreSQL means we can write stored procedures to make hotspots faster.
I agree that abstraction layers are good, though - we've chatted on the forums a bit about the pros and cons of refactoring towards PEAR.
Re:Gforge is very specialized. (Score:3, Insightful)
The ability to support MySQL or Sqllite or whatever would just be an side benefit of the abstraction layer, the real benefit is now you can hook into oracle or IBM dbs.
Just have to give up those in the DB functions.
-Electrawn
Slashcode is specialized too (Score:3, Interesting)
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
RMS in hospital? (Score:5, Informative)
He's in hospital? Nothing serious, I hope.
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:2)
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:2)
It's GNU/FLU
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:RMS in hospital? (Score:2, Informative)
Richard Stallman in hospital (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Richard Stallman in hospital (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Richard Stallman in hospital (Score:2)
Parent is a troll (Score:2)
Re:Parent is a troll (Score:2)
For Benefit of Lazy Bastards... (Score:2)
Would someone enlighten me to the main differences between Savannah, GForge and SourceForge?
[IIRC, SourceForge is written in PHP. I've never been comfortable with how customizable and interoperable the whole PHP package is...]
The diff between GForge, SourceForge and Savannah (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:For Benefit of Lazy Bastards... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:For Benefit of Lazy Bastards... (Score:2, Informative)
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, bugteste
Re:For Benefit of Lazy Bastards... (Score:2)
In other words, there may be very good technical reasons for not supporting mysql.
Also, if they accept mysql patches now, how are users who want to use mysql in the future feel if mysql support is dropped later? If someone wants a mysql version they should s
Re:For Benefit of Lazy Bastards... (Score:2)
Mountain? Mole-hill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not exactly. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [gnu.org] (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.
Re:Mountain? Mole-hill? (Score:2)
How important is X to you?
Also, what's the GForge license? It's quite possible that RMS sees nothing wrong with moving to GForge. (I know that GForge is Debian-Free, so it's likely to be GPL. In which case the choice of which site would probably be largely pragmatic.)
Re:Mountain? Mole-hill? (Score:3, Informative)
GPL [gforge.org].
About gna.org (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My thoughts on Savannah (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:My thoughts on Savannah (Score:2)
> the needs of different groups
Very well said. And this is happening with GForge installations. For example, there's graal.net [graal.net], which is "the home of Graal Player World collaborative development". Instead of projects, they've got "worlds".
Over on RubyForge [rubyforge.org], we're working on integrating the Ruby project distribution mechanism - Ruby Gems [rubyforge.org] - into the GForge file release process. It's mostly duct tape currently, but it's coming along.
Hostile to Copyleft? No.... (Score:2)
Also, I'd point out that GForge is released under the GPL....so if actions count...
Chris DiBona
Yet another app that's hardcoded to hell and back (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Re:No it does not aply to all those (Score:2)
the missing bits (Score:2)
h.
Re:the missing bits (Score:2)
Re:Open Source at its finest (Score:2)
Sorta like how Windows users are "trained" to handle their problems - either live with them or buy more software.
Re:Open Source at its finest (Score:2, Funny)
Re:gforge slashdotted? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:gforge slashdotted? (Score:2)
> host projects (besides its own)
Right on. That's made clear in the answer to question # 1 [gforge.org] of the FAQ.