Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

David,

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 6:11 PM, David E. Wheeler <david@justatheory.com> wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2009, at 9:06 AM, Guillaume Smet wrote:
>> "Somebody Elses Problem" is going to be ours if we consider the whole
>> community and not only the sysadmins/web teams. PostgreSQL is defined
>> by/appreciated for its whole ecosystem, not only the core code.
>>
>> As a community member I think it's a great thing to have a code
>> repository that we manage as a community:
>> - when we approve a project, we sometimes discuss the license with the
>> project creator;
>> - we also sometimes decide to give a dead project to another community member;
>> - we are sure the code repository won't go to trash because managed by
>> some random company having problems or making the wrong decision for
>> us;
>> - it's a good opportunity to have a lot of PostgreSQL projects
>> gathered in one place.
>
> None of this requires Web sites, email lists, bug tracking, or VCS. Just a central repository of releases. Think
PAUSE/CPAN.

The first 3 items do require it.

>> As a developer having a project on pgFoundry, I don't really like the
>> idea of moving elsewhere:
>> - I'm going to lose my trackers/forums history;
>
> There are ways to migrate that content, depending on how hard one wants to work at it.

See the GBorg migration disaster. And we did have the control of each
end of the migration path...

>> - I'll have to chose another place with CVS/Subversion repositories (I
>> don't really want to use bazaar or git) and hope it won't be closed in
>> the next few years.
>
> This will *always* be the case, and applies no less to pgFoundry itself. Even if you host your own Subversion install
itcould go away. (At least with Git you always have a complete copy of the repository in your clones, so can easily
moveelsewhere if the need arises.) 

I disagree with that. The community controls pgFoundry. I find it much
more future-proof than any other services (at least with the current
sysadmin team we have).

>> I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in this case and I'm also pretty
>> sure there's a lot of projects that won't be moved and will be lost
>> (either immediately or after a few years).
>
> Only if the site is shut down.

If we don't shut it down, we'll have to maintain it (at least for
security fixes) so I don't see the point of doing so.

>> I don't really see pgFoundry maintenance as something requiring a lot
>> of time. Am I wrong?
>
> From the sound of things, quite a bit of time has been invested with not much result. Not saying you won't get
results,just that discussion has given the appearance of large time investments. 

We need to move it anyway, even if we only keep it readonly.

We don't force anyone to use pgFoundry AFAIK. People could use github,
sf.net, launchpad... but they still use pgFoundry, even if it's old
and only proposes CVS. Perhaps there is a good reason to it? I'm
pretty sure we're not all masochist.

Note that if people want to stop the pgFoundry service, it's some time
I would be able to invest elsewhere. But I really have the impression
we want to stop it for bad reasons and without considering the service
it offers to the community as a whole.

--
Guillaume