Every time I hit a Sourceforge page, entire seconds are spent navigating to the actual page that I want. That's not to say that it's impossible to figure out how to get to where I want (that status is reserved solely for Launchpad). Rather, it just takes a lot of time to use Sourceforge. When the seconds are ticking away, and another page has to load, it's just infuriating. I want at most two page loads: whatever awful incoming link I came in from, and then the thing I actually want on the project. I keep forgetting the url structure, so I can't just type to what I want to get. GitHub and BitBucket have both done urls particularly well.. you can easily predict the exact url to immediately see the contents of a file.
Let's examine some Sourceforge urls.
main page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docutils/?source=directory
source code: http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=38414&...
Oops, wait, no.
real source code: http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/
Let's see a file... pick a folder, click a file and you get this:
http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...
I know this is viewvc, but who cares. When I click a file, I wanted the file, not the version history. Why is version history still the default action? Okay, click on the version and you get the content:
http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils?view=rev...
Well, no. This is just a diff. Okay, let's try clicking on the file again because ???
http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...
File contents, at long last! But the real url to get the actual file is something like this:
http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...
But does this work for other projects? Well, I seem to remember that FileZilla was hosted on Sourceforge.. let's see.
http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla
Well, at least that worked. Click around a bit..
http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla/FileZi...
Oops, repo moved. Well, let's try another project.
http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/
After a bunch of clicking..
http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/trun...
At this point, I think a lot of Sourceforge's problem is viewvc. And the number of pages in between the project page and the things I need to do. I think getting rid of viewvc would probably be a huge step forward. Why should I even have to type viewvc in the first place?
When you don't include viewvc in the url, you get to a directory index (argh):
http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMy...
But why am I including phpmyadmin in the url again anyway? It's already in the subdomain. And it's not a folder in the repository... so what's the deal.
BLAH