Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Using Sourceforge Subversion for OpenACS
In the discussion about how to increase awareness for OpenACS and the aim to attract developers one of the recommendations of the participants has been to move OpenACS CVS directory to SourceForge SVN and open a project page there.This is inaccurate. Frank proposed we move to Sourceforge. There were objections raised. The alternative - we link from sourceforge - was offered and no one seemed to have a problem with that.
About then I got this "how fucking stupid are we going to be" feeling and walked out of the meeting, perhaps after I left people changed their mind and decided it was a great idea.
Sourceforge gives second-rate service for second-rate projects that can't afford their own servers and bandwidth. It's unreliable, you're dependent on the goodwill of a company, etc etc. It's a great service for those who can't afford to host their own project. We can and do. We started on SourceForge because OpenACS 3 began as a personal project of Ben Adida, me and Roberto Mello, and at the time none of us had a personal server with bandwidth available for hosting. Reaching the point where we could self-host our repository with great bandwidth and a nice server was a milestone for our project. Suggesting we toss it aside and move backwards is ludicrous.
Merv's comment isn't quite strong enough. There's NO technical reason to move. It's ALL about a perception of a "marketing benefit". From a technical point of view it's right up there with rewriting the toolkit in .NET and SQL Server ...
Dave's comment about subversion isn't quite right, either. We've formally decided to move to subversion, took that decision a few months ago in the OCT. The only thing that's stopped us was that Lee's trial run of the cvs to svn conversion tool choked on some of our repository. So the move has been put on hold until someone has time to figure that out and fix it (I think we've talked about that happening in early summer we hope???).
So please don't talk about Sourceforge and SVN as though somehow moving to Sourceforge will lead to a decision to switch to SVN.
Moving our repository to Sourceforge is pretty much an "over my dead body" issue, I'm afraid. The proposal came from Frank Bergman, who wasn't nominated for a second OCT term because he never attended a single meeting. Not exactly a hardcore member of this community.
Malte, if you're serious about this, please TIP it so I can vote "no" ASAP please.
On the other hand, I do not think that singleing out Frank in the way you did is appropriate. It was his suggestion, yes, but it found approval by more people, including me, during that meeting. But that group did not constitute the whole community and the whole wisdom of the community. This is why I brought this up so we had the discussion in public.
Additionally it has never been my intention to link moving to SVN to moving to sourceforge in a manner where it means: "We need to move to sourceforge so we can move to SVN". I'm slowly doubting my english communication skills here in the forums 😊.
As you aptly suggested, we need someone who has the resources to see the move to SVN happen. And while he is at it, he might be wiling to take a look at getting a copy of the SVN synchronized to sourcefore. Or not, as Danielle mentioned, it might not matter that much. Yet I am *not* convinced we should be held up by the fact that we encounter errors with moving the history, if we are serious about moving to SVN, but that is an utterly different issue.
Again, there have been other suggestions on how to improve the visibilty of the community and I just hope that between Nima (who took notes) and Caroline (who chaired the meeting) they will come up again, otherwise I will have to continue posting (with all the repercussions this might entail (joking!!)). The topic of moving the repository over to sourceforge for me is dead, unless the resource providing SVN for OpenACS is willing to setup a sync server to sourceforge.
