Okay, I've been using SF.net for a long time for the Contentment project for almost four years to the day (started August 5, 2001). Well, today I said good-bye. I'm not requesting a project removal or anything that drastic. Think of this as more of a separated married couple rather than a divorce, but I'm contemplating the divorce.
Anyway, the event that actually brought it on was the fact that I was having a hell of a time trying to get Brian D. Foy's extra-handy release script to login to SF.net. I still don't know what was wrong. I dug for about an hour and began to evaluate the value SF.net was adding to my project and decided I was getting too emotional about it. SF.net wasn't providing me an hour's worth of effort in value.
What do I need in project management? Well, I need a source code repository. I've quit using CVS for the most part in preference of Subversion. However, SF.net has stated plans for, but not an implementation of Subversion, yet. So, I'm not using any of the public CVS facilities.
I need a way to make source tarballs and release them for download, preferrably on a mirror, in case my project ever gets popular. As a Perl project, the most natural choice for this is CPAN anyway. Uploads to CPAN require a two-step process that is so easily automated (in about 30 lines of code after the FTP upload), it's laughable to see that the same process on SF.net takes over 200 lines of code (again, after the FTP upload). CPAN also offers anyone who wants to give Contentment a shot the ability to just install it like:
cpan Contentment
that will download the latest version, unpack, build it, test it, and install it. SF.net can't do that (nor should it, really), but again, I don't really need them as another mirror. (Btw, at this time, this isn't the best possible way to install it, but it does work. I hope to make this a fine way to install eventually...)
I need a web site. Well, I need a web site I can control to a greater extent than SF.net offers. I have hosting through Dreamhost and can even use FastCGI to make database connections persistent. SF.net doesn't offer any such thing (of course, I pay for DreamHost). In any case, I don't use SF.net's web hosting, database, etc.
I need to post news. Well, heck, this blog can do that and I don't have to use the pathetic little "News" thing SF.net offers. No. No way.
I need to have bug posts. The "tracker" on SF.net is not what I consider bug tracking. It's more like a headache. My favorite bug tracker is RT. Handily enough, CPAN offers an RT bug tracker.
What else might they have? Hmm... donations. Well, that's easy enough to setup through PayPal directly. Why do I need them for this? PayPal also skims less off the top. I'm not getting any donations anyway. Mailing lists are also nice, but I don't really have anyone to talk to just now and I can get a list through Perl.org and have my project identified with Perl directly or I can setup my own mailing lists with DreamHost.
The SF.net web site is ad-ridden, slow, and doesn't really provide anything I can't either provide myself (Subversion repository and public mirror) or can get through CPAN (most the rest). Anyway, I'll keep my project alive there for now, but unless SF.net makes some drastic improvements, I imagine I'll ask for project removal.
SF.net was a neat idea 4 years ago, but the improvements that have been made haven't really impressed me that much. They've been very incremental and not very drastic. The paid side of things sounded like a great idea when they announced it, but they offer things like a better search tool and more ways to get project news. Bah. Who cares? I want better project management tools. If you gave me some compelling features, sure, but not for what they offer.
It seems to me that SF.net needs some innovators to come in and revamp the place. It doesn't even look that different than it did 4 years ago. Stagnate. They should fix that. If they do, perhaps I'll come back. In the meantime, I'm headed over CPAN where real changes have taken place in the last 4 years.
Public/anonymous CVS access
One reason that I was looking at SF was that they offered anonymous CVS access. With Dreamhost, anonymous CVS access isn't possible. I don't know much about maintaing a SVN repository - is it possible to provide anonymous access to a SVN repository with just HTTP access?
Nope, public SVN/CVS is not trivial
I decided to provide this server from my home file server on it's "dynamic" IP (though, it hardly changes). If I still used CVS, I would still use this feature of SF.net. Coming by a cheap CVS host isn't easy.
I did try using a Subversion -> CVS mirroring for a bit, but that's such a hassle. Essentially, someone's written a script that checks out the repository from CVS at revision X that has been mirrored to CVS already. Then, it checks each version X+1 and uses the Subversion logs to figure out which files to mark as deleted and which files as added, etc. This works great about 80% of the time. The rest of the time, Subversion's idea of removed or added doesn't match up with CVS and some manual intervention is required. Icky. Don't recommend it. The latest SVK might help, but I haven't been playing with that much recently (nearly ruined a repository for me a few months back).
Anyway, I'm in the market for a cheap (hoping for free) Subversion host, but I haven't found one. In the meantime, I run my own public mirror of my Subversion repository at home.
re: Public/anonymous CVS access
Yes it is possible to have an SVN which is accessible anonymously. You can checkout through SVN (command line or gui tools) anonymously, or you can view SVN via a web browser. SVN was designed with hope of doing things better than CVS.
You may want to check out the
You may want to check out these links here for information on SVN hosting that I've researched:
OpenSVN.csie.org (best found so far?)
SVN Hosting links I have recorded
Re: Public/anonymous CVS access
Huh? Of course you can, but it requires special hosting, you can't just create a public SVN server on your average web host. You either have to have a fully hosted server (as I have at home) or pay for a service, unless you're aware of some CGI script that performs DAV or other solution that I'm not aware of.
I have seen nearly all of these...
None of them satisfy my needs at this time. At this time, a 384 kbps upstream on my home DSL serves my needs better than any of them.