Re: LuaForge is down and will be for some time

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

> I'm really sorry for the trouble this have caused for everyone using
> LuaForge services and I hope we can have everything back asap.

> Meanwhile,  I'd like to know what you think about eventually moving
> from this setup based on GForge to one based on something else. One
> option would be to recommend that projects moved their SCM to sites
> like github or Google Code and then leave luaforge.net as just a
> catalog and news site.

I do not have any projects hosted on LuaForge, so I do consider my
opinion should have much weight in this issue. But here it is anyway.
:-)

I'm very sorry to say so, but current situation with LuaForge
stability looks truly horrible. In my opinion, it really hurts Lua
community reputation.

Besides stability issues, LuaForge is seriously outdated as a service.
GitHub, Google Code, Sourceforge all have much superior features (and
they do not force users to use CVS). It is hard to see why anyone
would use LuaForge to host their project, except maybe to emphasise
that "this project belongs to Lua world".

I would (partially) understand that situation, if LuaForge itself was
written in Lua (which some people do assume). Then there would be
sense to develop it, to bring it up to date. It'd grow a framework of
libraries (or a bunch of code anyway), that would be highly useful for
the community.

I think, that, given the lack of resources, it would be impossible to
bring LuaForge up to current project hosting de-facto standards. It
would be even harder to keep it up-to date with them over the time.
Unless someone is willing to give a grant on this, this would not
work.

It is an option to leave Lua forge as it is after restoring it. But, I
think, more and more projects would leave it over time. We can see
this happening already. Even Kepler is on GitHub now
(http://github.com/keplerproject). Such drain is not healthy.

There are a lot of great non-specialized project hosting sites. It is
hard to beat them with features. It is hard to have features that
would suit anyone. Some people prefer to host source code themselves
even now. I'd say, LuaForge needs to be converted to aggregator for
Lua-related projects. Ohloh (ohloh.com) seems to be a good model for
such aggregator. Add Lua snippets, LuaRocks support, and you're almost
there...

My 2c.
Alexander.