Sunday, October 28, 2007

SourceForge mailing list archive problems

It seems that the SourceForge Factor-talk mailing list archive has stopped archiving posts. The last archived post is from 11 days ago, but there were numerous posts since then.

The Factor project's entire Internet presence was formerly hosted on SourceForge. At some point I moved the web site, then downloads, over to my server. Hopefully soon, the mailing list will follow suit, and I can stop using SourceForge forever.

jEdit was SourceForge project #588. It was okay back then. Now there are 160,000 projects! In the last several years, I've experienced many "SourceForge moments":
  • CVS servers which are slow and almost always down
  • Anonymous CVS which lags behind developer CVS by days
  • Mysterious download corruption
  • Weird outages based on the first letter of the project (eg, "all projects starting with G-R are inaccessible")
  • Mailing lists where posts take days to appear
  • Not being able to log in on some pages
  • Ridiculously low disk quotas for projects
  • Download counters took them at least a year to implement properly

Of course this is a free service, blah blah, so I shouldn't complain. I'm glad there are other choices, like linode.com hosting, which is really cheap and trouble-free.

I'll bet that in the next few years, SourceForge will experience a huge outage and tens of thousands of projects will lose their data forever...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Fortunately, the NNTP interface and list archive at gmane are working fine.

Anonymous said...

A while ago I used BerliOS which is based directly on Sourceforge so it's not too big a leap.

Unknown said...

Maybe Google Code would be a reasonable alternative for providing downloads and a mailing list. They have lots of money, which helps.