Re: [eclipse-clp-users] Possibility of moving ECLiPSe from SourceForge to Github

Hi Sergii,

You flagged up potential problems with SourceForge (SF) a few weeks ago,
thanks for that!  Let me try to summarize the situation as I understand
it at the moment:

We are using Sourceforge (since open-sourcing in 2006) essentially

1. for our public source repository

2. as a secondary distribution point for binaries (in addition
    to the downloads hosted on our own site eclipseclp.org)

3. for our mailing lists (eclipse-clp-users and related)

As you indicated, there were several cases where SF wrapped their
own installer (which offers adware) around other projects' original
binary installer.  They did that to projects they called "abandoned".
The practice has apparently now been discontinued and a strict
opt-in policy promised.  A bad after-taste remains.

To the best of my knowledge, ECLiPSe was never affected.  As
long as you download ECLiPSe_x.y_z_*_nt.exe, you get the Windows
installer that was built and uploaded by us, and which is identical
to the one you'd get from the eclipseclp.org download page.
Also, downloading any .tgz files will get you our original files.

That said, I really dislike the SourceForge download page.  It
is littered with about 10 "download" buttons, some within ads,
some pointing to other projects.  Very confusing, and obviously
trying to tempt users into downloading things they didn't want.


In this light I would like to extend our independent infrastructure
for distributing ECLiPSe releases.  I have already added a mirror at

   http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/eclipseclp.org/Distribution

which is at the University of Kent in the UK.  It would be good to
add trustworthy mirror sites in other parts of the world.

*** If anyone has suggestions, or can host a mirror themselves,
please let me know -- it requires about 1.5GB of space and can
be updated with a simple rsync command ***


A separate question is whether we should migrate the source repository,
but maybe we can leave that to a separate thread.


Cheers,
Joachim


On 05/06/15 18:15, Sergii Dymchenko wrote:
> Hi,
>
> You probably have heard about recent GIMP - SourceForge scandal, that revealed
> SourceForge's practice of modifying projects' binaries to include AdWare.
>
> That event triggered mass exodus from already not very popular SourceForge.
>
> I wonder if ECLiPSe developers have thought about moving to Github?
>
> I believe many people think about projects on SourceForge as old and unmaintained.
> Migrating to Github can greatly increase visibility of the project and the
> number of possible contributors.
>
> Of course, the migration is not a trivial task, but there are a lot of success
> stories and even scripts to automate the task like
> https://github.com/ttencate/sf2github
>
> -Sergii.