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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

#4

Post by josso »

lcswi wrote: post #2

Nice! But in my opinion better help archiveteam with their efforts!

Definitely. And if you want to help out visit [1]. There’s options to download binaries[2] as well as source code[3] from SourceForge.

[1]: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge

[2]: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/sourceforge-grab

[3]: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/sourceforge-grab-rsync

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

#5

Post by danieloaks »

hydragit wrote: post #3
lcswi wrote: post #2

Nice! But in my opinion better help archiveteam with their efforts!

I confess my ignorance regarding archive.org's various collections. There seem to be a lot of them, which one are you referring to?

They're not a part of archive.org (just a totally separate group with similar interests, lead by Jason Scott). The specific project page is here: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge

The best place to pop in is probably on IRC. For the Sourceforge project it's #coldstorage on EFnet, http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?nick=&channels=%23coldstorage&Lo... for the web client. Though note, the ArchiveTeam project seems to be paused right now.

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

#6

Post by voltagex_ »

hydragit wrote: post #3
lcswi wrote: post #2

Nice! But in my opinion better help archiveteam with their efforts!

I confess my ignorance regarding archive.org's various collections. There seem to be a lot of them, which one are you referring to?

See the response just above yours - ArchiveTeam is separate from archive.org

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

#7

Post by pavlov »

Why Github? Copying from one commercial provider to another doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Using git helps, but most of those old repos will never get cloned.

In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.

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

#8

Post by Osmium »

Honestly, this is a serious issue for my field. There are so many obscure academic binaries hosted on SF... I hope someone manages to mirror them. [The fact that a lot of the scientific community is so backwards in adopting modern coding standards is another conversation for another day.]

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

#9

Post by ksherlock »

That's great. I started doing that myself (my own git server, not github) for some projects I care about. This effort seems include a very narrow list, though.

For CVS, though, I suspect cvs-fast-export [1] will do a better job than git-cvsimport.

1 http://www.catb.org/esr/cvs-fast-export/

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

#10

Post by Klathmon »

pavlov wrote: post #7

Why Github? Copying from one commercial provider to another doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Using git helps, but most of those old repos will never get cloned. In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.

Do you have any other suggestions? Hosting these repos on donated/personal machines is (IMO) significantly less likely to stand the test of time.

At least with a commercial entity there is a bit more "trust" involved that they won't disappear out of the blue one day. And if the time comes that Github starts to collapse, the process can be repeated.

Just because something isn't permanent doesn't mean it's pointless.

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