[Oberon] Native Oberon on sourceforge - was: USB, bloat, LNO,

[John Drake]

--- Brantley Coile <brantley at coraid.com> wrote:

> > Sourceforge is the archive or 'graveyard' of
> abandoned F/OSS 
> > projects, more than anything else.
> > 
> > Stuff most often goes there when no one has an
> interest in 
> > working on it any longer.
> 
> We (Coraid) uses sourceforge for live stuff.  I
> suspect that more
> projects get started, put on sourceforge and then
> the writers loose
> interest in them, making it seem like it's a
> graveyard.

My thoughts exactly!  While I'm not (currently)
running any SourceForge projects myself, I OFTEN
download live projects on SourceForge.  The good
thing about SourceForge is that there's a good
chance the servers will be up and running and
since you aren't charged for using it projects
can continue to "live" even after it might not
be feasible for the author to maintain it 
otherwise.  But that doesn't make SF a 
"graveyard" at all.  Quite the contrary.  
Looked at it another way there are a lot of
projects that are REALLY dead (read, nobody
can even access them anymore) because the 
author didn't pay to keep the hosting going
and/or they moved on from the university they
belonged to and their site was removed.

There's code that I used to download from
one of the ETH servers (Hades I think it was)
that's no longer available.  For instance
a System 3 Autodesk animation viewer.  I
requested that once and someone emailed 
it to me (I don't remember what I did with
the file now) but if it was on SF it would
still be available.

The only drawback that I see to using SF 
is that there isn't an Oberon CVS client
to my knowledge.  (The "cvs client" 
mentioned earlier doesn't actually do
the network upload/download stuff that's
expected of a real CVS client.  It's just
for converting S3 text to/from ASCII while
preserving formatting.)

For this reason alone I'd rather see a 
WebDAV solution since there's an Oberon 
WebDAV client.  But if the server isn't 
kept running.....

Anyway, with all of that said, if the 
definition of "alive" is "actively
maintained and updated by it's original
authors" than N.O. is certainly on life
support at this point.  Clearly it will
be up to the community to maintain it.
SourceForge is a good tool for that.
Infrastructure can be built from scratch
if that's what people want to do, but
there's no guarantee that infrastructure
will be here 10 years from now.  In
contrast SourceForge probably will be.
If we get something else out of custom
infrastructure (WebDAV for instance)
I'm all for it.  Otherwise, why bother?

Oh, is anyone working on - thinking 
about a REAL CVS client for Oberon?

Regards,

John M. Drake

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