At 15:56 Uhr +0100 25.11.2002, David wrote:
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On Montag, November 25, 2002, at 03:30 Uhr, David R. Morrison wrote:
Seems to me that sourceforge is serving our needs quite well, and I for one
am proud that we were selected as their project of the month.
Well, I cannot relate to that, but Ia m sure, that it is an honour.
There are issues with Sourceforge which will always hamper our
further development. Questions like can we run perl cgi-scripts or
not, will never arise on our own Server.
I am pretty sure we can do it... not that I like the idea of doing it.
And actually, having a team that works hard to maintain a server for
me, so that I can concentrate of the actual issues, instead of having
to bother maintaingin a server, seems like a boon to me.
Furthermore mirroring binary distribution sets will always be a
pain, I do not know if you read the request of a large university to
mirror or binary packages. This is not easily possible, since there
is no rsync provided by sourceforge and special arrangements would
have to be made.
So you did actually ask the SourceForge stuff? Or are you guessing?
We did allow for rsync mirroring our bindist in the past, when it was
still on the SF.net servers, BTW.
I'd be interested to get the link to the suppor request tracker item
where the SF.net team rejected the request for rsync of our stuff.
Personally I dislike the single location with sourceforge and the
fact that you are somewhat bound to their limit system.
Ah, that's what it boils down to (like with 99% of the people I met
who diss SF.net) - personal dislike :-)
That being said, the biggest need that we have IMO is for more volunteers,
since there are a number of tasks that aren't get done as regularly or
as systematically as they might. We could have a monitor the package
submission tracker committee, a build distributions regularly committee,
a sort the submitted bugs and assign them committee, and so on.
I can only agree and that is my strongest point. I wish to organise
fink and that requires a lot of voluntary work. Work which no
developer likes to do, because it is tedious and simply annoying, a
lot like the paper work we all like to avoid if possible. I will try
to find volunteers and I will try to sort them into groups with the
permission of all of you. I will try to coordinate them and I will
even try to recruit them. Yet a fink server, where I can create my
own little word for them, using squiremail or horde, giving them
their own email, etc, will make it a lot easier on you and me.
We can, if we think it's useful, still have an own server, to host
email addresses. Or other things, we have to... But right now, I am
not willing to give up on SF.net that easily. I am very very happy
with the services they have been and are still providing to us.
I have watched projects in the past from SF.net, claiming they did
not get all they needed. Dillo for example - just take a look at
their homepage and have a good laugh about the help plea on it.
A server we host on our own also means we have to maintain it on our
own. Somebody has to pay the bandwidth, for example. You know what
was the main reasons SF.net asked us to move the bindist from the
webservers? No, not the disk space (a couple GB), it was the fact
that we incurred multiple GB/day of load. So if we host our own
bindist server, be prepared to pay for that.
One option I see, if it turns out that indeed our bindist can't be
rsynced to external mirrors, though: we could setup our own server to
host a master copy of the bindist; we'd still rsync it to the SF.net
servers, and mirrors could use it, but we'd try to restrict access to
it otherwise (e.g. by letting the apt config files point to the
SF.net mirrors by default, as before).
The problem is not with resources like mirrors, but with finding enough
interested people.
I think there are enough interested people, but many are a bit
hesitant with sourceforge, just like me. I hated the idea of
becoming part of their net, just to submit to fink. But once more,
that is a personal issue and I cannot speak for others.
Yes it is a personal issue, and I wonder on what you base your claim
that many are a bit hesitant with sourceforge. I have only
encountered a handful of people for whom it was true, in all cases
when pressed it boiled down to personal dislike.
I have a personal like for them, and not just because I am personal
friend to some of the staff, but that does figure in, too, I admit
that. It also means I never worry about getting good support (and
those people I talked to on complained about bad support from SF.net
so far always were basing it about experiences they made over a year
ago before SF.net restructured their QA).
As for mirrors, I think it is important to gather an infrastructure
now and not when it is nearly impossible to let those who are
interested grow with
