Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

Josh Berkus wrote:
> All,
>
> My $0.02:
>
> With the presensce today of Launchpad, Codehaus, SourceForge, Tigris,
> Java.net, CPAN, GEM, Developerworks, Github, Code.Google.com, and
> others, it seems silly for our project to be putting our scarce admin
> resources into maintaining/improving an outdated collab site. Let
> others do the work.
>
> There's also a 2nd advantage to having the PG accessory project mostly
> hosted elsewhere: it makes us more visible to outside communities.

and makes it harder to aggregate them back into a canonical
search/aggregator which is what some people want...

>
> What we need out of pgfoundry is five things, none of which require a
> full collab framework, and some of which are really unrelated to the others:
>
> 1) a place for less offical mailing lists (e.g. non-permanent
> non-(at)postgresql(dot)org mailing lists) which can be created without the
> whole process required for a new "official" list. Note that many of
> these lists are not related to any code development project.

I hope you are not advocating we should put those lists on
@postgresql.org again which is almost the opposite of what you proposed
with "hosting stuff elsewhere. Also a fair number of the above mentioned
resources don't actually provide mailinglists.

>
> 2) a place for web pages/documentation for some projects (which could be
> a wiki, or something else)

hmm? again this sounds like a central wiki (which we have) or are you
asking for every project running their own wiki?

>
> 3) a search and download service for postgresql accessories (something
> pgfoundry currently does a poor job of)
>
> 4) a news feed for postgresql accessories (something pgfoundry currently
> does a bad job of)

again the news feed stuff is mostly a tool issue (newer fusionforge
versions do actually have way better RSS feed capabilities). However
what we probably want is a thin aggregation layer on top of those (maybe
a version of planet.postgresql.org on steriods with aggregates the
various feeds and adds search on top).

>
> 5) A place to store files for download for internal project use which is
> easier to manage than mediawiki's "images", and includes the ability to
> restrict files to a specific access list. Like (1), these files are
> largely not related to specific development projects.

imho that one is not at all related to pgfoundry or the problem at hand.

>
> It seems to me that *all* of the above could be better done than how
> pgfoundry does it, and done in a simpler and more maintainable way.

so what place would you redirect people too if they ask for a listing of
stuff related to postgresql? and no I don't think a manually maintained
"software catalogue" like we have on the website is any/much better.

What we need is aggregation of information and it is kind of hard to see
how we would get that out of any of the existing collab sites (except
maybe freshmeat but even that would not work too well). For stuff on pgf
we essentially get most of the important information for "free" as part
of people running their projects. Just because we failed to utilize that
information so far does not mean that the whole concept is flawed.

Stefan