Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

On Thursday 31 December 2009 13:43:43 Dave Page wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> 
wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-12-31 at 18:37 +0100, Guillaume Smet wrote:
> >
> > <major snip>
> >
> > I believe people are looking at this the wrong way. Migration is such a
> > trivial issue in comparison to the larger problem it isn't even funny.
> >
> > .Org has NEVER made Gborg or PgFoundry a priority. Migration to
> > FusionForge will not change that because Migration is the easiest of the
> > problems to solve.
>
> At the risk of pissing off some people, .org did put effort into
> maintaining GBorg - it worked very well and was supported by it's
> original author and others who chipped in from time to time as needed.

It did run well, but you are glossing over some history here. A lot of people 
wanted to see new features added and/or improved with that code base (svn 
support was a big one), and there were issues with both code access and 
extensibility of that codebase that it was decided we would not overcome. That 
was one of the big sells with pgfoundry; new feature development would be the 
work of someone else, and we could just manage the software. Of course things 
didn't turn out that way, for a host of reasons sure, but clearly moving to 
the new system was not a success (where is my svn support?) based on the 
original intentions.

> It did not put effort into maintaining pgFoundry, largely because it
> was setup outside of the normal .org processes and infrastructure
> management (consider for example, the fact that it's pgfoundry.org,
> and not part of postgresql.org like all the other services we
> maintain).
>
> I'll also note that it's extremely easy to say that migration isn't an
> issue when you host most/all of your projects elsewhere, and won't be
> migrating anyone else's projects. As I believe the only person that
> actually did migrate active projects from GBorg to pgFoundry, I can
> say with complete confidence that it is not trivial in the slightest,

You can believe that, but it simply isn't true. I helped migrate several 
projects between the two sites, some my own but many I had no involvment in. I 
know Marc and Devrim both helped out during that process. I agree it isn't 
trivial, but it is a process that can be distributed amongst those who are 
most directly the stakeholders (ie. the projects themselves)

> and that it will be much easier to upgrade and maintain a new,
> properly documented VM within the normal management processes than go
> through the pain of migrating just a handful of projects. 
>> The issue,
> is simply one of time, and going forward, ensuring the the site is
> properly maintained by people willing to put in the effort, rather
> than leave it to fester. In the hands of the infrastructure team, much
> of the problem vanishes as it becomes 'just another VM' to manage.
>
> In any case, pgFoundry isn't going anywhere. If people don't want to
> use it, that's fine, but there are many people that do actively use it
> and don't have the time, energy or desire to try to migrate elsewhere,
> myself included.
>
> Oh, and to end on a positive note - Happy New Year folks :-)

So far so good :)

-- 
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com