SourceForge.net Gets a Shiny New Look | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge.net Gets a Shiny New Look

sourceforge.net

12 pointsnirav11 comments

I realize now why Github is so awesome. For a site named Sourceforge, it sure takes a lot of searching to find the source code of whatever project you're looking at.

With Github, the source is the most important part of the site as a whole, and it shows.

Wow, just experienced how difficult it is to find source on SF.net. Whoever made this change might be running shareware sites like download.cnet.com in his/her past life.

Just spent about 10 minutes searching for how to get the source code for a project and I'm utterly unable to find it. Care to enlighten us all? Do you need to be logged in?

It may depend on the project, but here's one positive example. I went to the home page, then clicked on one of the featured projects. I've used Chicken of the VNC before, so there I went: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/

Next, click on 'Develop.' On the new page under Repositories > CVS, there is a link to 'browse code': http://cotvnc.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cotvnc/

Agreed, it is definitely not GitHub.

Thanks! It definitely seems to depend on the project. If there's no repository configured then you can't browse the source. I made the mistake of assuming everything would have a repository though. Some projects (e.g. 7zip) seem to rely on you going to a separate home page and finding the source there instead.

Not a fan. I usually like "clean" designs but it doesn't automatically make it good.

Project homepages are the worst pages I've seen so far. Example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/. The details aren't well layed out and there's a lot of wasted space.

You probably didn't see what kind of crap SF.net was before this redesign. I think they did a good job of redesigning homepage but project pages stlll look like they are work in progress..

I wish they would respond to my numerous password recovery requests (which were due to them getting hacked few months ago and subsequently resetting all user passwords) instead of spending time on shiny stuff. And that's not even considering the existence of GitHub that's pretty much "SourceForge done right".

So, yeah, I don't know. I have few projects hosted on SF back from 5-6 years ago, but I think SF's time has passed, new look or not.

try #sourceforge on freenode; live support from 8-5 on weekdays

It's a great redesign (even if it's clear where they got the inspiration from) and one can only hope for a "simple foundation for the rebirth of the entire SourceForge.net site" as they say on the front page. Because it's been a while since I hosted my last project on SF, and it's been ages since I last saw anyone else use anything but GitHub for a code repository. SourceForge has de facto become a free distribution mechanism for binary installs now, but the actual source management has gone elsewhere. I love GitHub, but I'd really like to see SF stay competitive, too.

BitBucket's popular in the Python community, and I see a fair amount of stuff on Google Code. Open-source projects who want to use git but prefer a FOSS forge tend towards Gitorious. Some people even use Launchpad, although that tends to be mostly just Canonical.

Of course, none of these sites are Source Forge. Too little, too late.

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