According to slashdot, savannah.gnu.org is going to migrate over to GForge. Seems like a big sudden change until you realize GForge, Savannah, XoopsForge, etc. are all forks off the old Sourceforge 2.0 codebase (codenamed Alexandria) and aren't that much different at heart.
It's kind of frustrating to see things splinter like this, but really, that's what it's all about. Everyone grabs the source and tailors it to their own needs--just like what we've done in JDE Design Studio, where we needed to lock out anonymous public access from all project services, so we just forked off the Savannah codebase. A single solution will not simultaneously meet all needs.
Posted by Alan at April 13, 2004 11:59 PMlet's not forget about limited resources (server maintenance/admin) on a single large repository (read: point of failure) and possibly politics (free/open/indifferent software ideals for hosted projects)
Posted by: Matt at April 15, 2004 10:59 AMThanks for pointing these further things out, you're exactly right. Sourceforge over the last few years has been a study in why the central approach won't work: lots of downtime, slow response time from staff, people freaking out about it going commercial. As a result projects are fleeing the wreckage in hordes & ending up all over the place.
Still it would be nice to have a central directory and distribution point for open source projects like CPAN--not necessarily a central hosting solution. Probably even this umbrella would be too big though.
Posted by: Alan at April 16, 2004 02:07 PM