Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

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.

> 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.

> - 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 it could go away. (At least with Git you always have a complete copy of the repository in your clones, so can easily move elsewhere if the need arises.)

> 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.

> 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.

Best,

David