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- RangerRick, on 10/12/2007, -6/+64How can I not digg my own rant? heh. Now, I hope my server will stand up to it. :)
- rolypolyman, on 10/12/2007, -14/+46CVS sells medicine and a few groceries, but actually most of the store is cosmetics and hair care.
- f00xx0riz3r, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17CVS is a versioning system. You use it to store changes of files thus making it possible to revert to a specific old version of that file.
Why someone in their right mind still uses it while subversion is around beats me though. - sapolion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12As a fink user, there are a few things you need to know for this to make sense. Fink ( DarwinProject also does this) makes tons of open source programs available to OSX, by installing software on a Mac that lets you select the program you want then goes out, checks dependencies, grabs the source of the programs, and compiles it on your Mac. So having CVS down screws a lot of users who may not have a full grip on everything that's happening. CVS is one option which may have to be eliminated now for Fink end users - and of course the developers can't update either.
- crythias, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13CVS is a versioning system. It enables developers to keep track of revision history (different versions of files) as they edit, and provides logging of these changes as well as ability to show differences between versions.
Think of CVS as the back end of something like WikiPedia, where you can see all the changes that have been made.
CVS (concurrent versions system) http://ximbiot.com/cvs/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page has been popular, but some projects have changed to use SVN (subversion) to handle large projects. Instead of individual files being version-incremented on save, SVN version-increments the whole project. SVN has some other features that CVS doesn't support, including the ability to move files between folders in a project.
http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php has a better breakdown than I can state here. - paperhat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9What are the alternatives to sf.net? I know tigris.org seems to have a similar concept, but it seems like they are more selective about what projects they will host. Anybody know of other alternative services?
- emostar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8SF has had issues for quite a long time. One of the biggest complaints I had is how the anonymous CVS server was 6 hours out of sync with the developer's CVS. And how anonymous CVS access almost always failed. I think they fixed that now... but I moved my project away from SF.net, except for file releases. They provide many mirrors so it works out nice. And the mailing list is still there... at least until we have some problems. Currently I run SVN, Mail and Web services on my own server in my apartment and it is holding up fine (will be getting 100Mbps fiber here in a few months.. should be even better then).
And keep in mind, our project is ranked #6 of all time on SF's most active list.
http://sourceforge.net/top/mostactive.php - Orbatos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand why a project like Fink was hosting anything other than dev stuff on SF anyway. I was never under the impression it was designed for this sort of thing, perhaps overuse of specific aspects of SF with no regard to the impact on other users is more precisely the issue here.
The Fink project should more appropriately be caching rather than allowing every user to pound SF like it does. - jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8If this takes off you should get around 60,000 hits in the next few hours... which took my little p4 server and slowed it to a crawl...
- mhuot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Sad but true, SourceForge seems to be the speed regulator for open source projects.
- xcomputerman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's not just Fink.
SourceForge's first and oldest project, Enlightenment (www.enlightenment.org) finally decided that enough was enough and started up their own CVS server too, a couple of weeks ago. We had been dealing with CVS unreliability for many months...anonymous CVS sometimes out for days, even developer access suffering, having to maintain external mirrors because anoncvs would take hours to sync up with developer commits.
I actually thought it would be a somewhat significant story given that SourceForge started off with Enlightenment, and some of the original VA Linux employees back then were key E developers. - wezzul, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7As stated in teh rant, it's a free service that provides an amazing amount of bandwidth for free. Sure, there may be problems, but when you aren't PAYING for anything, you really have no right to bitch about it. And really, you can't blame SF for trying to sell something on the site. After all, they have to offset the cost of bandwidth some way, right?
-digg - doubleYou, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8@bairy
It's a version control system. These systems allow you to coordinate changes to files. - proton, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10Pay for hosting and do it yourself instead of ranting.
- lefticus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4When I evaluated setting up my own source collaboration site I looked at gforge. It's seems you need a PHD in GForge installation to get that thing set up. As proof of this, they sell a hugely expensive installation kit. I ended up settling on savane, which is light weight and has all the features of SF. Plus savane has ubuntu and debian files you can just apt-get.
- bairy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I do coding, just on my own and it's not stuff that's released to anyone else, so I know about file versioning but not CVS specifically.
Now I (and others who didn't know I suspect) have a better understanding, thanks. - jonbeckett73, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The easiest (and best) alternative in many ways is to host your own CVS service.
- ninepoundjammer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@proton
"Pay for hosting and do it yourself instead of ranting."
Wonderfully simplistic world-view... thanks, but no thanks.
Just so happens that projects paying for "subscriptions" like mine are screwed just like everyone else. Haven't been able to get into CVS since Monday. We used to run our own server, but due to the security environment where we work it was extraordinarily difficult to give any access to external collaborators. When we switched, source forge looked like a nice option, but it has been amazingly and inexcusably unreliable. Not to mention their lack of ability to just tell people what's going on. We were 2 days into the current outage before they bothered posting any info whatsoever. It's just inconceivable that a site hosting 100,000 projects could be so ineptly designed and managed. I think we'll give them one last shot with this new infrastructure they're rolling out, but one more episode like this, and our project, along with its subscription fee, is gone. - RangerRick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you'd read the article, you'd see that we have a new host donated by xs4all, SourceForge just crapped out on us before we could move to it.
- Xalorous, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3FYI freshmeat is part of OSTG too...just like SF.net
- davidswelt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I use SF's CVS for my project, and it's been broken for weeks. While I appreciate the free service they're giving me, I can't live with their reliability problems. Public CVS is not in sync with the developer CVS, which means that my compile hosts need to be insecurely configured, or the nightly builds simply don't work. Now that developer CVS is broken, I will have to seriously consider alternatives.
Any recommendations for a SourceForge replacement? - dmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Well, I will happily agree with this and as the Fink PR/Fundraising dude, I think it is about time this has been said :) The more exposure this gets, the more of the other projects will benefit from better service.
- Archailect, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I agree with the SF interface being hard to use. I was going to start a project on there about 2 months ago and there was no link to create a new one. After two emails and 3 weeks delay they added a link, but I went ahead and created a wikiesque site to collaborate with my friends on software at http://www.antiwikipedia.org
- StrawberryFrog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sourceforge has worked ok for my little open project
but it also has aproved empty/uselss/joke projects like this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/perversion - t3hX, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Fink USERS fed up with SF.net too. Personally, I find the SF mirrors almost never work properly in either Fink or Darwinports.
- brownb2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I totally agree SF is messed up, I have a project that has been pending review for nearly 2 weeks, its supposed to take 2 business days and I'm still waiting.
F it, I'm moving it to Freshmeat - energeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I host my project on sf too and there are quite a lot of annoyances, the only concession is that you get hosting space, SVN.
Just for that you have to bear the following hassle.
1. They don't allow your server scripts to write to your home, so you can't use something like drupal/other CMS.
2. Their website is so damn slow and pages are jsut scattered all over with links pointing to DOCs whose url is numerical, so you have no way to directly manipulate it and manage to reach the page you want.
3. To release a file you first upload it to their /incoming, then create a 'release'. Why not just get the release version and name from the filename itself. I mean almost everyone follows the standard -. notation. And most of the settings like svn imports, SSH key updates seem to take 24 hrs. - lefticus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Man, I wish Digg allowed truly nested comments...
Anyhow, talk about discriminating on the basis of religion. You are assuming I am a) some 'fundie' and b) would randomly delete someone's hard work purely for my own amusement.
It's a site for hosting software for a particular interest group. It's exactly in line with the philosophy of the maintainers of projects like savane and gforge (many, mini specialized hosting sites).
Now, if my site said "We only host open source games," would you have said "I prefer sites that do not discriminate based the one's ability to program games?" I'm guessing not. - dmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4If you have any ideas how we can provide the necessary funds, then please comment about that in our wiki. You can find the proper category here: http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/Fink:FinkMakeMoney
Please understand that in a 2 month timeframe we transferred around 1.8 terrabyte, so this is a major issue for us money wise. - Itkovian, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well, I'm rather fed up with it myself, as I like to keep up with the JikesRVM code base. However, most updates fail, due to the server being unresponsive etc. Grmbl.
- dmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Actually you should check your facts sheet.
1.) SF has a whole mirror system to distribute releases to _end users_
2.) Fink has long ago switched the main distribution of info files to rsync
3.) Only contributors and developers with write access actually send data to the CVS repo
4.) anonymous CVS is exactly there for that reason so that _everyone_ can download the data
5.) Most users that are still on CVS cannot use rsync for one or the other reason. - audiohacked, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3i think RangerRick should just leave his development source code and actually use his own server for end-users of fink. Sourceforge was/is not meant to be used to serve content to end-users; its used to host source code of projects. What Stupidity!
- mcherm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The Python project has also just moved away from SourceForge largely because of quality-of-service issues (and also the desire to move beyond the capabilities of CVS). They chose to move to subversion, and are hosting it themselves.
- papaia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2All so true - I am a kde and fink user (obviously macosx), and I can tell that there are many of us waiting for a patch which has been developed, but which we cannot reach.
- terranika, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Sorry, I prefer a website that doesn't seem to discriminate on the basis of religion. The last thing is some raging fundie pressing the Delete button on months of development work.
- dmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yes indeed. But we tried to mitigate that a long time ago by providing rsync as the preferred update method for users. However, he is correct, everytime something in the *.info files (where fink gathers information how to build something) is updated into CVS. The rsync Master servers then grab that info from CVs and replicate that on the slave rsync server.
- bairy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+8I have a vague idea of what CVS is but don't really understand it.
Could someone please write an analogy of what it is, and what SourceForge have/n't done? - Xalorous, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Actually, you should look at SourceForge.net (and the other OSTG sites) as loss leaders. They sell advertising on the pages, and they sell premium services. Every project hosted at sourceforge brings them free hits, and assuming they sell adverts on a per-hit basis, that is a good thing.
As for the way they have changed their repository, I can see both sides.
On the SF side, anyone who has migrated a server can understand that when you're in the middle of the migration, if something were to happen to the older system, there is a point where it would be easier to bring up the new system.
On the Fink side, the ability to seamlessly migrate the users from one update method to the next would definitely be desirable. At this point, I can only recommend that you find the smoothest method you can, and try to move on without rancor. - jonbeckett73, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have had similar experiences to the folks at Fink with my own projects too - I used to think that Source Forge was the "way to go", but have changed my mind. It's poorly designed, and their server performance is awful. With the minimal costs involved in setting up your own CVS server, I can't see a problem with running your own at all.
- clicksnapshot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yes, because we all know that code written by atheists is incompatible with code written by Christians. Don't even get me started on Buddhist-written code....
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You may want to try http://www.berlios.de
The site uses an older SF CGI, and has everything: CVS, SVN, web hosting, ftp, and so on.
We are using it for 3 year and, although there is some occasional downtime, it works pretty well and it's free. - wware, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I also host a project on SF and I'm getting developer complaints about CVS access. There have been suggestions that the Subversion servers are more reliable than the CVS servers, but it sounds like the whole thing is going down in flames.
My problem with leaving SF is that SF is popular. I'm no publicist, and with SF, at least people find my project every now and then. I could try to pitch it in various venues, but that's obnoxious and I prefer to let people find it when it's a legitimate solution to a problem they have. SF has given a good way to find it. - gekkokid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2i find actually editing the page of my project a pain in the AS$, it rarely works not even very basic/minor changes
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1freshmeat is great if you're not listed there already.
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1suckage ... you M$ fanboys make me ill ... why do things like that get buried? MICROSOFT SUCKS. Let's see how long this one takes to get buried ... like anyone will bother now that it's not front page any longer. Digg needs to rethink it's moderation methods ... slash's moderation approach is better than this free-for-all approach. If you want to be able to bury stuff (or jump on things like a fanby) I think you should earn the right to do so first.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1As was mentioned before, there's also http://bountysource.com/ which has a new SVN browser that was featured on ajaxian... and integrates bounties into project tasks/requests.
- Kiba, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Meh...I am happy with the service. I never have to deal with CVS issue.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5which is why even the slightest improvement would benefit almost the entire open source world.
i find SF's interface in general to be clunky, and hard to navigate. I'm glad I don't use CVS because of the recent outages on top of that. - orjan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1GForge (http://gforge.org) might be an alternative for those fed up with SourceForge... You need to have your own server to install it on though.
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