SourceForge vs Yahoo

Robert Brenstein rjb at rz.uni-potsdam.de
Wed Sep 10 20:50:01 EDT 2003


There seems to be a split between going with Yahoo or SourceForge for 
development. I have been in a few yahoo groups as well as on 
sourceforge for a while. Yahoo groups definitely get hacked once a 
while, although spamming there is not such a big deal for me since I 
get tons of spam anyway. More annoying are waves of complaints from 
group members that follow. In my mind, sourceforge seems to be more 
suitable for this project because of its developer orientation. It 
has a number of areas that we may (but are not required to) use. And 
we don't need an advanced setup to begin with.

In particular, we can use the "files" area for simple html-based 
downloads of distribution files. CVS is needed only for controlling 
the development codes by making it easier to coordinate efforts and 
keeping track of who is doing what and when.

Yes, we do not really have to use CVS, but if we want to use it, we 
could split IDE into individual stacks and/or groups of scripts to 
facilitate development by multiple people. We would need an 
"assembler" that would put a proper IDE from those components for 
testing and distribution, but that should be a trival thing within MC.

The "Tracker" and "RFE" areas may become handy to follow up on who is 
doing what on the long-term. With a small and persistent group as 
ours is now this might be an overkill but it may allow those less 
involved to see what's going on and possibly contribute. It just 
frees you Richard from having to track things offline.

Here is a simple info page from another open source project I am 
involved to some degree. I followed the instructions there and had no 
problems fetching the sources, although admitedly the cvs stuff is 
somewhat unintuitive.

http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=2&page=1

One thing that was not discussed on the list, or I have missed it 
somehow, is the official web site for MC IDE. SourceForge will not 
suffice if we want to make IDE available to more general public. 
MetaCard's web site would be a perfect place since this basically 
will be continuation of MetaCard as it was to us, but I wonder 
whether Scott would let us use it and what plans he has for that site 
on the long term. A corner on Rev's site could suffice, but then we 
would probably have to go through Rev to post anything since it would 
be part of their corporate web site. I think having a mention and 
link there would be better for us.

Robert



More information about the metacard mailing list