moving to SourceForge

Stephen Weeks MLton@sourcelight.com
Thu, 4 Apr 2002 11:38:32 -0800


> I don't remember if it was Sourceforge or some one else, but as I recall with
> their system you don't have a shell account to your own CVS files,  only  CVS
> access.

That is correct.

> That would be pretty bad since several times I have had to go and
> manipulate the files by hand and not through CVS.

True, it could be better.  But, I don't think it's a showstopper.

> some point, and again, I'm not sure it was Sourceforge but I think
> it was, when they re-organized people could not even get their CVS
> files.  They could extract any point in history, but they could not
> get the actual CVS repository files.  Hence you couldn't move
> without losing your history.

I don't think this is a problem at all.  Like I said, they make
nightly snapshots of the CVS repository available for download.

> Also I really think that the chances of Sourceforge going away is
> very non- trivial.

Even though I disagree, it doesn't matter.  We can pick up and move.

> If you really think that some other hosting place is the way to go,
> the GNU version would be a better bet, although my impression is
> that it isn't quite there yet.  I think it just makes no sense to go
> to closed- software and a company to support this kind of stuff.

I will look into the GNU stuff.  Although, they are a couple of orders
of magnitude smaller, so I would expect it to be more painful.

> I don't think that having it on Sourceforge or Sourcelight.com has any effect
> at all as far as promotion.  Why would it?

It's not the difference between domain names -- it's the other
features that I think make it easier for people to explore MLton:
anonymous CVS, CVS web access, archived mailing lists with a web
interface.

> It could well be that this is all tied to my disgust with CVS, which is still
> very  healthy,  but I just don't see what the problem is.  If people want it,
> they can get it.  The links already are out there.

I don't know, but am interested to see if we get more people who might
want the ease of a web interface to look at a single file in the
sources.  That seems attractive to me.

I think we're in agreement about what's good and what's bad.  We just
disagree on the relative tradeoffs.