Re: LuaForge is down and will be for some time

[Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@...>]

I just want to mention that moving Kepler to github was not a
renunciation of LuaForge, I think having a central index of Lua
libraries is very important, and I am not the only one that thinks
this can be done with a much simpler platform than Gforge. More
importantly, I think it can be done with a Lua-based platform,
probably something based on Sputnik.

André has been warning for some time that LuaForge was pretty much on
life support, and this crisis is a good time for the community to move
on; there are plenty of options for online SCM repositories, issue
trackers, mailing lists...  after LuaForge gets back online I am
infavor of setting a grace period for anyone to move those parts of
their projects elsewhere, and bootstrap a new site with the catalog
part.

I also spoke with Hisham that now is a great time to move the main
LuaRocks repository to luarocks.org, with the release of LuaRocks 2.0
imminent. He agrees and assured me that he was going to do that.

--
Fabio Mascarenhas, Lablua
http://www.lua.inf.puc-rio.br




On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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 Besides stability issues, LuaForge is seriously outdated as a service.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.
>