[Info-vax] SourceForge, was: Re: Using VMS for a web server

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-04 02:57:30 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> On 6/3/15 8:01 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Be warned: given recent events,
> 
> What events?

Some background on the so-called "SourceForgery" kerfuffle:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/ 

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/anatomy-of-sourceforge-gimp-controversy 

https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/06/02/what-happened-to-sourceforge/

>> SF is rapidly getting blacklisted by people in general so telling 
>> technical people to download stuff from SF is not likely to go down 
>> well.
>> 
>> The only thing I would currently trust from SF are the source code kits 
>> (but only if there were no other download source for them) and you 
>> won't catch me downloading those source code kits from a Windows 
>> system...
> 
> Well, that's a shame. As I write this I'm preparing to upload binary 
> kits for OpenVMS of the latest release of Perl to SourceForge. You seem 
> to be saying I shouldn't do this but I have no idea why.

I'd hope that at some point, VSI gets a few cycles to look at project 
hosting, either outsourced or their own server.  Having access to the 
download data might be interesting to the VSI folks, too.

One overarching downside at present is a general lack of easy-to-use 
OpenVMS tools for doing distributed source control.  There's some work 
try to make that easier including work toward a pre-installed OpenVMS 
kit for hobbyist developers, but — even for an experienced user, 
getting SVN going or particularly a newer environment such as git or 
mercurial going is presently a non-trivial slog.   If you're not using 
an add-on GUI IDE, then getting a LSEDIT session and some command line 
tools to connect with a repository other than CMS and a build engine 
other than MMS would be nice, too.   (This also ties back into the lack 
of common tools in OpenVMS that I mentioned in a posting elsewhere — 
client tools and repositories are both missing from OpenVMS, and "going 
your own way" with platform-unique tools such as CMS and MMS not only 
makes for more efforts, it provides comparative limits in the DVCS and 
distributed build tools; in the more current world.)

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