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Gallery YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE. Sourceforge Advisory Council Bharat Mediratta March 9 th , 2006. About Gallery. Web based photo sharing product Written in PHP Installed on 300,000+ websites Joined SourceForge.net in June 2000 In the top 30 most active projects ~30 member team.
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GalleryYOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE Sourceforge Advisory Council Bharat Mediratta March 9th, 2006
About Gallery • Web based photo sharing product • Written in PHP • Installed on 300,000+ websites • Joined SourceForge.net in June 2000 • In the top 30 most active projects • ~30 member team
What’s great about SourceForge? • Most central place to find Open Source • If we rank highly here, we get found • Content distribution network! • Without this, we cannot afford to release code • Instant Feature Set • Small projects get everything they need to get off the ground (bug tracker, cvs, mailing lists, etc) • High availability -- SF’s uptime is excellent
What else is great? • Rapid technical support (for most things) • Distributed project administration • Pretty good site documentation • Easily supports high volume, archived mailing lists. • Compile farm can be very handy
What’s not so great? • SF.net is very tech centric. • Eg, FRS confuses the heck out of newbies: • From: -----@aol.com • Subject: Help! • I hve been trying to download Gallery and am frustrated because I keep getting sent in circles. When I click "download now" I get information on updates or an add to buy a T-shirt. • How do I download the program? HELP!
What’s bad? • Feature set is years out of date • Forums aren’t in the same ballpark as best of breed products • Project search is underpowered • Trackers aren’t very customizable. We resort to putting special keywords like [G2] in the subject • Mailman is way out of date. Spam overruns us.
What’s bad (cont’d) • User Interface is woeful at times • Why is the “submit news” box 55 x 6? You can’t write anything reasonable in that. • Admin navigation makes no sense at times. Eg, you click News -> Admin, instead of the other way around. • Why can’t I update info about more than one file at once in FRS? • How many bugs do I have in the G2 category? • Forums are completely worthless. • Not enough admin tools to keep them in check
Ow, SourceForge hurts me! • CVS is so s-l-o-w! • Development stops! • This has gotten better (thanks, guys!), and SVN holds promise • Developer vs. Anonymous slows down our iterations. • Users can’t easily find existing bugs • …so they file duplicates!
Make the pain stop! • Tasks system is very weak • Who is the task assigned to? • Why didn’t I get notified? • Who submitted this task? • File releases are so painful. • Entire projects (like ReleaseForge) have formed to improve this one problem! • Gallery has released 1300+ files and counting. Last night’s release of 134 files took me 4 hours, largely because of FRS.
What’s missing? • SF apps cannot compete with best of breed products (eg: phpBB forums) • SF embedded apps are not up to date with the latest code (eg: mailman is way, way behind) • SF does not provide easy access to the data. • You can download the entire CVS repository, or up to 32MB of your tracker data in XML • We have written apps to scrape the HTML pages (!) to get tracker data (so that we can do things like feature voting)
So what does all this mean? • SF’s “instant feature set” makes sense for new projects • As projects grow, they are unable to fit their needs into what SF offers • SF needs to decide whether they care about keeping larger projects
What can SourceForge do? • Provide APIs to get to the data • Then admins can automate posting news stories, file releases, administering the tracker • Letting projects interoperate with SF.net data so they can hook into the SF backbone. • Focus on usability! • Newbies need to be able to download the app! • We want newbies to be able to file bugs easily • Keep tools like mailman current! • Add greater flexibility to tracker/tasks tools to help projects manage themselves.
Pie-in-the-Sky things to try • Switch to using best-of-breed applications like phpBB for forums. • Let projects pay for a higher level of support (not just users) • Super fast CVS is worth $$$ to us • Open source it again! • We’re PHP devs – we would submit patches.
Conclusion • SF is a huge enabler in the Open Source arena – it gets new projects off the ground • As projects grow, SF becomes less and less useful as the project outgrows what SF offers • With a focus on usability and data interchange, SF could provide the backbone for larger projects and keep them as customers.