Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Using Sourceforge Subversion for OpenACS

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Lets step back and ask "why" we would want to switch. What are the perceived benefits.

So far I have this from the thread:

1) increase exposure, OpenACS has daily commits during active development, so it would get listed as an active project on sourceforge. Question: how many people can we attract this way? Would there be another way to get this type of publicity? Could we mirror our repsitory to sourceforge with a script?

2) Offer downloads frm there. Not much benefit there, we have a download package and seem to have a reasonable system for managing the release process. Not a big benefit there.

3) We would not have to host the code repository. We have a donated machine that is working quite well, and volunteers to maintain it so not alot of benefit here.

Downsides to sourceforge

1) slow, or unavailable repository.

Is there anything I am missing? What was discussed at the meeting as the reasons for switching.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Dave, you pretty much summed it up. It was a very brief discussion with the motion to move the repository to sourceforge for greater exposure. This includes having them track the number of downloads to see how out toolkit fairs in comparison.

What I personally draw from the feedback is, apart from the idea of mirroring the code, we should not move it over to sourceforge, so I won't TIP it. Thanks for the feedback guys.

That being said, there are other suggestions from that meeting which will be posted about soon which I hope should help us with regards to exposure to new developers.

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Posted by Daniël Mantione on
The expose andvantage is basically a form of seach engine optimization, the SourceForge search engine ranks you higher if you have a high activity score.

While we do everything ourselves, placing downloads on Sourceforge too, already puts us in the top 300 of high activity.

Still, I think this is a very poor way of exposure. Things that expose Free Pascal are for example:

* Benchmarks, being no 1 helps a lot :) : http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&calc=Calculate&xfullcpu=1&xmem=1&xloc=1&binarytrees=1&chameneos=1&message=1&fannkuch=1&fasta=1&knucleotide=1&mandelbrot=1&meteor=1&nbody=1&nsieve=1&nsievebits=1&partialsums=1&pidigits=1&recursive=1&regexdna=1&revcomp=1&spectralnorm=1&hello=1&sumcol=1
* Contests: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/competitions.php?p=details&c=3
* Being used by commercial companies, example: http://www.morfik.com
* Evangelism by users, example: http://ik.homelinux.org/index.rhtml/other/lectures/fpc_about

All of these things share one thing: They happen outside freepascal.org and are initiated by the community, not the developers.

For OpenACS, it is the best web toolkit, it has amazingly talented developers, and has commercial backing. Going to Sourceforge just to be found in their search engine seems a sign of weakness to me. The fundament is to have a strong community, and this is what OpenACS needs to work on.