5 ms·

Man, when Sourceforge fixed the wget "misfeature" a few years ago, that was great. They should do more of that. Every time I hit a Sourceforge page, entire sec

by kanzure 14y ago

Man, when Sourceforge fixed the wget "misfeature" a few years ago, that was great. They should do more of that. Every time I hit a Sourceforge page, entire seconds are spent navigating to the actual page that I want. That's not to say that it's impossible to figure out how to get to where I want (that status is reserved solely for Launchpad). Rather, it just takes a lot of time to use Sourceforge. When the seconds are ticking away, and another page has to load, it's just infuriating. I want at most two page loads: whatever awful incoming link I came in from, and then the thing I actually want on the project. I keep forgetting the url structure, so I can't just type to what I want to get. GitHub and BitBucket have both done urls particularly well.. you can easily predict the exact url to immediately see the contents of a file. Let's examine some Sourceforge urls. main page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docutils/?source=directory http://sourceforge.net/projects/docutils/?source=directory source code: http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=38414&source=navbar http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=38414&... Oops, wait, no. real source code: http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/ http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/ Let's see a file... pick a folder, click a file and you get this: http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt?view=log http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we... I know this is viewvc, but who cares. When I click a file, I wanted the file, not the version history. Why is version history still the default action? Okay, click on the version and you get the content: http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils?view=revision&revision=7571 http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils?view=rev... Well, no. This is just a diff. Okay, let's try clicking on the file again because ??? http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt?view=markup&pathrev=7571 http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we... File contents, at long last! But the real url to get the actual file is something like this: http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we... But does this work for other projects? Well, I seem to remember that FileZilla was hosted on Sourceforge.. let's see. http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla Well, at least that worked. Click around a bit.. http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla/FileZilla3/trunk/ http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla/FileZi... Oops, repo moved. Well, let's try another project. http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/ http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/ After a bunch of clicking.. http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMyAdmin/user_password.php http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/trun... At this point, I think a lot of Sourceforge's problem is viewvc. And the number of pages in between the project page and the things I need to do. I think getting rid of viewvc would probably be a huge step forward. Why should I even have to type viewvc in the first place? When you don't include viewvc in the url, you get to a directory index (argh): http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMyAdmin/user_password.php http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMy... But why am I including phpmyadmin in the url again anyway? It's already in the subdomain. And it's not a folder in the repository... so what's the deal. BLAH

arthurdenture 14y ago
To be fair, it looks like those are all old-style projects. The new platform -- the one the headline links to -- sucks a lot less. e.g., http://sourceforge.net/projects/allura/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/allura/. Source browsing works more like you would expect and less like ViewVC. No, I don't know if they have a plan to forcibly upgrade old projects. I wish they would do so, because the new platform is far less terrible.
- runn1ng 14y ago
  Hm, so, let's look at something more modern. The project Allura page seems nice, altought I still don't understand why they have one sort of navigation in "code" view and in "non-code" view, that looks completely different. Also, the link "Pastebin" displays a 500 error in "non-code" view (http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/?source=navbar http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/?source=navbar) but works in "code" view ( http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/ http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/ ) - you switch "views" by clicking at "Git", apparently. You switch them back by clicking at "Files" or "Summary". Why does the Allura project have thousand of badly named branches? (It may be a goal but it looks confusing from outside.) Now let's look at some other project that's linked at SF front page http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/ What's the difference between "Wiki" and "MediaWiki"? Oh, once is inside SF, the other one directs me somewhere else and tells me it isn't working. Was that needed? ...why is the code part empty? Is that a bug? The News are not very new but that's not an error on SF side, I guess. Overall, I feel like SF jumped 5 years forward - from a site from 10 years ago to a site from 5 years ago. But I still wouldn't use it for any kind of new project.
- airfoil 14y ago
  It looks like there is some sort of plan in place as I received a "SourceForge Project Upgrade Notification" a few days ago letting me know that they've upgraded an old project of mine to the new platform. My project is small, really old, and unmaintained so maybe they're starting with low visibility/impact projects.
smoyer 14y ago
I agree completely ... but you also forgot the "sponsors". It's amazing that my download can't begin immediately, but that there's time to display an ad. I'm sure glad they didn't leave me there bored!

by kanzure 14y ago

arthurdenture 14y ago

To be fair, it looks like those are all old-style projects. The new platform -- the one the headline links to -- sucks a lot less. e.g., http://sourceforge.net/projects/allura/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/allura/. Source browsing works more like you would expect and less like ViewVC. No, I don't know if they have a plan to forcibly upgrade old projects. I wish they would do so, because the new platform is far less terrible.

runn1ng 14y ago
Hm, so, let's look at something more modern. The project Allura page seems nice, altought I still don't understand why they have one sort of navigation in "code" view and in "non-code" view, that looks completely different. Also, the link "Pastebin" displays a 500 error in "non-code" view (http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/?source=navbar http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/?source=navbar) but works in "code" view ( http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/ http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/ ) - you switch "views" by clicking at "Git", apparently. You switch them back by clicking at "Files" or "Summary". Why does the Allura project have thousand of badly named branches? (It may be a goal but it looks confusing from outside.) Now let's look at some other project that's linked at SF front page http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/ What's the difference between "Wiki" and "MediaWiki"? Oh, once is inside SF, the other one directs me somewhere else and tells me it isn't working. Was that needed? ...why is the code part empty? Is that a bug? The News are not very new but that's not an error on SF side, I guess. Overall, I feel like SF jumped 5 years forward - from a site from 10 years ago to a site from 5 years ago. But I still wouldn't use it for any kind of new project.
airfoil 14y ago
It looks like there is some sort of plan in place as I received a "SourceForge Project Upgrade Notification" a few days ago letting me know that they've upgraded an old project of mine to the new platform. My project is small, really old, and unmaintained so maybe they're starting with low visibility/impact projects.

smoyer 14y ago

I agree completely ... but you also forgot the "sponsors". It's amazing that my download can't begin immediately, but that there's time to display an ad. I'm sure glad they didn't leave me there bored!