Apache Allura — Open source project hosting platform | Hacker News Reader

Apache Allura — Open source project hosting platform

allura.apache.org

131 pointsahmedfromtunis60 comments

Let me apologize in advance for neglecting to sugarcoat this feedback:

This would benefit in a major way from a pass by a designer / UX person. The first thing I noticed (and the reason that I won't even try using it) is that it's significantly uglier than my terminal. GitHub has set the bar for Git web UX at "pleasant enough to look at all day" and this falls way short of that. I struggle, probably more than average, with spacing and layout; but I am one dev and they are the Apache Foundation.

It's also hella slow: it is to GitLab as GitLab is to GitHub.

I love it. The problem I have with Github is that for them everything starts with a repo, even projects, which usually should consist of multiple repo are reverse, one repo can have multiple projects.

I like functionalities, UX sucks but it doesn't matter for me.

GitLab now supports project without a repo and subgroups. So you can have multiple projects without a repo.

I have increasingly noted that Gitlab surpasses Github in the number of features. Good job!

Except when it comes to backup.

Or speed. That's why we had to migrate off of Gitlab.

I'm sorry to hear that. GitLab.com is slow and we're working on improving that, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947

Self hosted GitLab should be fast. GitLab.com has an export to move all your project metadata to a self hosted instance.

It looks like someone saw SourceForge and thought "You know what would be great, if I could host my project on SourceForge, but have to deal with all of the admin myself too!"

If the infrastructure underneath is solid, it might be as easy as redoing the presentation layer to make it more reasonable... but I'd have to have more than a cursory glance to tell. It's just hard to want to do that when you've immediately got the taste of SourceForge in your mouth...

I think it's the underlying software that powers SourceForge itself. At least, that's what I gather from some pages on sourceforge.net displaying "Powered by Apache Allura" inside the footer.

It is literally SourceForge:

"Allura began in October 2009 as an open-source reimplementation in Python of the developer tools for SourceForge (previously written in PHP), and was first announced in March 2011. Allura became the default platform for new projects on SourceForge in July 2011."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Allura#History

And it is python, not java! Color me surprised coming from an Apache project. Nice!

Does this have some relation to Sourceforge? The UI is a direct copy:

https://sourceforge.net/p/smplayer/code/HEAD/tree/ https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/git/ci/master/tree/

I'm also curious why this is such a thing in various code/project hosting applications. GOGS was cloning GitHub's UI (down to the level of copying their CSS) for a long time and still retains a lot of similarities. Is it that hard to come up with a novel UX for code browsing and project management?

Yes. This is the sourceforge platform...there are some older talks (pre-apache adoption) from sf people about it.

Yes. SourceForge developed Allura [1] starting in around 2009 [2], and was accepted to the Apache Incubator in 2012. Meanwhile, the preceding SourceForge software was a fork of a community project that was in itself a fork of their oldest platform, apparently [3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110315035603/http://sourceforg... [2] https://blog.bitergia.com/2012/11/13/some-charts-about-allur... [3] https://blog.bitergia.com/2012/11/16/the-history-of-fusionfo...

Interestingly, there is also Apache Bloodhound (http://bloodhound.apache.org/ ), which is _also_ a forge/project hosting system.

However, Bloodhound, which started out as a Trac clone, seems to be less active in development: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/bloodhound/trunk/

I'm a bloodhound PMC member by way of working at the company that initially sponsored development. Unfortunately that project is pretty much dead.

It's more like a Trac distribution / fork with only few patches to the core, but with some additional plugins and a custom theme.

Trac itself is more active (and stable) though and still has one of the best ticket systems, repository browsers and plugin architectures anywhere. It supports Git, wiki and more out of the box. And there are plugins for nearly everything else including neat auto-completion: http://i.imgur.com/Q9aBtJN.gif

The "Online Demo" button brings me to the download page. Is this a bug?

Instead of a random stock photo from a factory, why not put up a screenshot of the main UI.

Most likely because they know it looks bad.

It's just sourceforge.

https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/ this is a live version, why need screenshot?

Because as someone new to the project, I have to spend a non-trivial amount of time to learn how to use a demo before I get to see how it works/whether I should consider it.

It's marketing, and a proxy for how much they care about the user experience. A first-contact message of "You work it out" makes me worry that they will prioritize other technical work above user-facing interface issues.

All you have to do is click one link. That is hardly non trivial. Also, there are screenshots, at least I found it in a non trivial way.

As a new user, which link do I click on? Git, Wiki, …? How do I get to the "compare proposed changes against existing changes" screen? Does it allow me to make comments? How many lines can each comment be associated with?

This is roughly what I want to find out.

edit: I think it's great that you have the time/familiarity to work out how to use the product quickly. I need help to see the potential advantages quickly, and I'd appreciate it if the project made a big effort to show itself off.

This isn't a knock against OSS projects; commercial projects are just as bad (or worse, since decision makers can always pay extra for support and shift blame to the vendor).

In the "WHAT IS ALLURA?" section

The first link takes you to: https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Features/

Which tells you a LOT of information like "tickets" or "git" or "activity".

now, if you are a tech person, you won't need any more information, this is already exactly same as soureforge, if you are non tech then my above comment does not apply to you.

This isn't about me, it's about how the project is presenting itself. Blaming me for not getting it is missing the point: the project's presentation makes it hard for people who don't know what it is to work out if they should spend some time with it to work out if it's worth paying attention to.

Saying "it's just like SourceForge" doesn't help me: the last time I earnestly used SF was with https://sourceforge.net/projects/sdlpl/files/, and it's changed a lot in the last 10 years, and my single question "can I do code reviews with this?" becomes two: "can I do code reviews with SF?" & "does this project attentively include every SF feature?"

I looked at https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Features/#code... , and I don't see any ability to comment on a proposed diff. But this might be an omission! My lunchtime is nearly over…

I am sorry if I appeared to attack you, I had no intention :)

you do have valid points, the project should be proactive in advertising.

from the first click I could see I would never want to use it...

Took me 5 minutes to find that page by my own. Screenshot or central link would be nice.

Why I would use it instead of GitLab?

why is there ever more then one or anything?

it's competition, and that's always a good thing,

Sure, but I'm not asking about the right to use it. I'm in a technical community where maybe someone can explain me why I should try it instead of going on with my company successful utilization of GitLab. I believe it must have some advantages and I'd like to know about them.

There's also https://github.com/gogits/gogs

And https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/

Well, GitLab is slower than my pet tortoise.

Are you talking about GitLab self installed or the SaaS? GitLab.com is slow and we're working to improve that in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf... and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 GitLab self installed should be fast with enough memory. I don't know if Allura has a SaaS service.

Sorry, I'm talking about GitLab.com. I don't use it, but anytime I visit the site suffer so much with it that the experience makes me think the worst from GitLab in general.

GitLab.com is not representative of the speed of GitLab self hosted. If anything it is making self hosted faster by surfacing scaling problems.

While that may be true, don't you see a marketing problem here? Most people would assume that Gitlab.com is representative of the speed and UX of Gitlab self hosted. It's almost like your demo site to be honest.

Surely anyone considering self-hosting it would realise it's performance was going to depend on what they hosted it on?

I don't think I would assume the free 'demo site' would be hosted on the beefiest offering available such that I could only do worse by self-hosting.

Without actually trying it out in a self-hosted scenario (and this is a non-trivial time investment to do), you don't know if that situation is because of the scale or some constant factors. The slowness could be because of thousands of projects hosted, or because of stupid interaction with git which slows down every single page. Until you try it for yourself, it could be either. (it seems to be the former mostly)

The load is probably more important than the server capabilities: I imagine gitlab.com is slow due to the sheer volume of access and the number of projects being hosted. Self-hosted instances aren't likely to a) allow random strangers to host stuff and b) attract a large population of such strangers.

Agree on this one. I know that hosted GL works much better, yet I have to remind myself about that every time in discussions, because I mostly used the hosted version for private projects.

My company tried to migrate to Gitlab.com and had to migrate back off after just a few days because of how awfully slow it is. It has soured our view even of the self-hosted option, and since we would probably need some of the EE features we don't really have a desire to try it out.

> I don't know if Allura has a SaaS service.

Sourceforge.net.

Installed.

Well, there's another comment here saying that Allura is even slower.

2G on a self-hosted GitLab instance is good enough, try it!

Aaaaand the UI is ugly like hell.

A combination of gitorious, sourceforge and the 90ths with a bit of modern dripplet over :D

I wouldn't say "ugly as hell", more like old-fashioned. I've seen much worse...

Not even a screenshot?

I don't have time to play around with this at the moment, but I don't think I would want to mess with something whose author didn't even bother to put a screenshot up for a product that requires you to jump through a lot of installation hoops like setting up docker server, etc.

Can't you click "Wiki" and see it in action? Beats a screenshot.

No, it doesn't beat a screenshot. Their purpose is totally different.

Screenshots (on a landing page) usually depict a view the creators think is important, and beautiful to show the visitors.

A wiki to a screenshot is like a man page to... A screenshot.

After having made a look at the tool though I understand why there is no screenshot. It is basically an uglier and slower version of gogs.

I think he means that the wiki is part of Allura, so it's more like a demo. You can try it directly, see here: https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/git/ci/master/tree/

If you click on the link saying "Allura's features" on the front page you're taken here: https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Features/ which has some screenshots.

The comments on this page remind me why I've never posted any of my projects here.

Heh, any public internet forum will more likely come up with criticism than with new contributors.

In my opinion if you post your project here, it should realistically be for two reasons:

* you want to learn - in which case I think this HackerNews is probably better than the vast majority of internet forums

* you want to promote your project/product and probably have some financial end goal - again, it's probably a good idea to post here if you're at least a bit confident in your product

I'm extremely surprised to be honest.

I wonder if HN has always been like this.

this is one of the biggest TurboGears projects out there. loved it that they open sourced it.

not very alluring, the features are OK. but nothing you can't get on free tier elsewhere.

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