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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

jeffcovey.net

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Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#71

Post by ris »

blablabla123 wrote: post #3

Actually the site used to be really useful. Somehow I forgot using it though. One day Ubuntu came out, the package manager (including dep mgmt) worked really well and there was a ton of great software in the repository. But in the tar xzf ... ; ./configure && make && sudo make install time it was really nice. I wished something like that existed for JS libraries.

"One day Ubuntu came out, the package manager (including dep mgmt) worked really well and there was a ton of great software in the repository."

But without resources like freshmeat, how are the packagers supposed to find out about new software to package. There is still one hell of a lot more unpackaged software than there is packaged, and finding it is going to become ever more difficult.

I'm personally quite annoyed by freshmeat's shutdown - I still checked it every (other) day.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#72

Post by giis »

rg3 wrote: post #38

Wow. I was still using it to monitor new releases of iotop. I think this is going to be shocking news for anyone who was running Linux or BSDs in the early 2000s.

Yes, you are right its a shcok, I used to monitor new releases of few project via freshmeat. :(

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#73

Post by jcd748 »

jimwalsh wrote: post #6

That was an interesting article to read. I have many fond memories of the very early days of Freshmeat and my introduction to OSS and Linux. Freshmeat helped people share their products and was a great place to find new and upcoming projects to check out or even help on. I feel like the late 90s was such a Wild West time for Linux. Linux is in a great spot now, best it has ever been, but for whatever reason the commu…

There was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple blogging engine.

You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different. The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#74

Post by fithisux »

Disaster. I was relying on them for keeping my Windows 7 FOSS installation updated. I did not use proprietary except windows (of course) and ccleaner / skype. Simply disaster. I have to rely now on SF feeds/Filehippo and QT-apps.org

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#75

Post by blablabla123 »

ris wrote: post #71
blablabla123 wrote: post #3

Actually the site used to be really useful. Somehow I forgot using it though. One day Ubuntu came out, the package manager (including dep mgmt) worked really well and there was a ton of great software in the repository. But in the tar xzf ... ; ./configure && make && sudo make install time it was really nice. I wished something like that existed for JS libraries.

"One day Ubuntu came out, the package manager (including dep mgmt) worked really well and there was a ton of great software in the repository." But without resources like freshmeat, how are the packagers supposed to find out about new software to package. There is still one hell of a lot more unpackaged software than there is packaged, and finding it is going to become ever more difficult. I'm personally quite annoye…

"I'm personally quite annoyed by freshmeat's shutdown - I still checked it every (other) day."

Wow. Yeah, but good point about the package maintainers. I think there is this weird mechanism, products targeted towards a large consumer audience tend to be much better than products targeted to the "producer side".

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#76

Post by mariuz »

stonogo wrote: post #34

Freshmeat stopped being useful when they converted the well-organized and useful software trove into a worthless pile of tag garbage, and deleted a third of the information in the process . Before, it was possible to find, for example, a TUI email client written in perl with a BSD license, thanks to the ability to drill down into the trove. After the redesign, it was goddamn near impossible to find anything -- especi…

I usually updated the firebird page before the big update but it bacame useless and painfull to the the page updates after the redesign

For example befora i could do releases for beta and stable versions but after i had just kind of worthless tags also i had svn branches for each kind of relases

http://freecode.com/projects/firebird

I guess in time also sourforge will die , almost all open source development is moved to github these days

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#77

Post by mtdewcmu »

walterbell wrote: post #59
mtdewcmu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is auto-curated (at least partly). I'm not sure how much faith I would put in an editor, and projects like Ubuntu and Homebrew already act like gatekeepers. It would be valuable to come up with a good way of recording the opinions of the crowd, though, and it would be more cost-effective, too. Searching for free software on Google Code or Github isn't bad, but they only index their own projects. There mig…

How about https://www.ohloh.net ?

Looks like an interesting site. Thanks
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