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Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

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Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#81

Post by ihatehn »

nadams wrote: post #31
bentpins wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was in progress, 830GB was downloaded before a Sourceforge guy popped onto the IRC and said he's ok with the archiving, but that the robots.txt should be respected. This would put things at a practical standstill. So the downloading was paused, I'm not really sure what's happened in the week since. Right now Xfire's videos, several URL shortners' links, and Toshiba Support material are being archived. If you hav…

Honestly I think ignoring robots.txt in this case is acceptable. Even if he programs in code to respect robots.txt - once the management at sourceforge get wind of what he is doing - what is stopping sourceforge from putting up robots.txt everywhere blocking him?

Look at their current robots.txt; they're already prohibiting robots to crawl the actual source code: http://sourceforge.net/robots.txt

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#83

Post by frik »

bentpins wrote: post #17
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #12

Why aren't you mirroring the binaries? These are vital for people in the future who do not have the time to set up a build environment for software from a decade ago. I'd also echo the concerns of others about GitHub. Proper archivists should do for SourceForge what they did for other projects. Archive Team, maybe? Looks like they have a wiki page: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge

This was in progress, 830GB was downloaded before a Sourceforge guy popped onto the IRC and said he's ok with the archiving, but that the robots.txt should be respected. This would put things at a practical standstill. So the downloading was paused, I'm not really sure what's happened in the week since. Right now Xfire's videos, several URL shortners' links, and Toshiba Support material are being archived. If you hav…

Sourceforge doesn't host the binaries themselves. Universities and others offer mirrors (like HEANET) for free!

So the mirrors should just cut the upload write permission for Sourceforge and transfer it over to archive.org or ArchiveTeam.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#84

Post by dbbolton »

nitrogen wrote: post #80
dbbolton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your criticisms of Savannah seem oriented around aesthetics rather than its actual functionality. Personally I don't need much eye-candy for a git host because 99% of my work is done from the command line, but even if I cared about that I'd still pick Savannah over SF any day of the week.

I thought this had been resolved years ago, but aesthetics aren't about eye candy. They are about productive and pleasant experiences. As a tangible example, imagine yourself working in a dank, contaminated 6' diameter sewer pipe with spotty pirated electricity, vs. a well-designed, large interior space with plenty of natural light and reliable utilities. Regardless of how irrelevant appearances are to you, I'd wager…

That's a terrible example and it doesn't address my point at all.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#85

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

egsec wrote: post #63

Note 1: Moving things to GitHub or elsewhere does not remove them from SourceForge. So SF can continue to host and enjoy links on unmaintained websites, search engines etc. Note 2: If their business model is offering popular binaries and source, they can just copy these from other sites and repackage them. Open source software allows you to do this. If no one else is interesting in bundling and monetizing, then they…

Per the historical record, that "academy award winning movie from 1943" was 'Casablanca'.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#86

Post by scrollaway »

dbbolton wrote: post #84
nitrogen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this had been resolved years ago, but aesthetics aren't about eye candy. They are about productive and pleasant experiences. As a tangible example, imagine yourself working in a dank, contaminated 6' diameter sewer pipe with spotty pirated electricity, vs. a well-designed, large interior space with plenty of natural light and reliable utilities. Regardless of how irrelevant appearances are to you, I'd wager…

That's a terrible example and it doesn't address my point at all.

It does actually. UX, aesthetics, all of it is important and stuffing your head in the sand saying "Hey, I don't care about aesthetics, I just use the command line" is a very irresponsive attitude.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#87

Post by nextweek2 »

jaytaylor wrote: post #42

What about creating a torrent containing all these unmaintained SF projects (with binary downloads included)? This would dramatically increase the odds that the content is never lost.

The problem with torrents is the lack of incremental update support. If the base torrent gets updated it gets a new hash identifier. How do you know its been changed to ensure you get the latest version. When you do the swarm effectively gets diluted because some are on the new architecture and some are on older versions.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#88

Post by sebastianavina »

hk__2 wrote: post #67
goldfeld wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten years from now for all we know we could all have so much cheap storage and bandwidth and good, open p2p software that all coders get to archive their own full copy of github's repos. So the focus should be on getting today's job done now.

> open p2p software that all coders get to archive their own full copy of github's repos Do you mean git?

first we need cheap 10 Tb hard drives

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#89

Post by jaytaylor »

nextweek2 wrote: post #87
jaytaylor wrote: post #42

What about creating a torrent containing all these unmaintained SF projects (with binary downloads included)? This would dramatically increase the odds that the content is never lost.

The problem with torrents is the lack of incremental update support. If the base torrent gets updated it gets a new hash identifier. How do you know its been changed to ensure you get the latest version. When you do the swarm effectively gets diluted because some are on the new architecture and some are on older versions.

If the SF projects aren't being updated, then what's the issue? The information is, by definition, static.

Re: Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub

#90

Post by dbbolton »

scrollaway wrote: post #86
dbbolton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a terrible example and it doesn't address my point at all.

It does actually. UX, aesthetics, all of it is important and stuffing your head in the sand saying "Hey, I don't care about aesthetics, I just use the command line" is a very irresponsive attitude.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that Savannah's website being ugly is not a reason to say "it's no better than SF", because it's still miles better.
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