Episode: 831
Title: HPR0831: Chris from Sourceforge.net
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0831/hpr0831.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:10:16

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Hi everyone, this is Patu. I'm at Ohio Linux Fest and I'm standing here talking with
some guy from SourceForge. What is your name anyway?
My name is Chris Everest.
Hey Chris. So you came with SourceForge today. What do you do for SourceForge?
I work with SourceForge site operations. So the team that I work with maintains all the infrastructure and handles all the production deployments for SourceForge.net slash.org
and some other smaller sites like Geek.net which is our parent corporation.
What about FreshMe? Is that SourceForge?
FreshMe is also affiliated with Geek.net and we also do, we maintain the infrastructure for FreshMe.org.net.
Gosh, it's so bad I don't remember that.
One of those takes you to a bogus domain.
Alright, one of those. That's cool. I think probably a lot of the listeners of Hack and Public Radio are going to kind of know SourceForge already.
But in case there are people who don't, what exactly is SourceForge.net?
SourceForge is an outlet for open source developers, open source projects.
We provide any service that you could possibly want to maintain open source project.
SourceCode Management and all the variety of SourceCode Management software as you could think of.
Project web space, database hosting, forums, ticketing, anything I could go on and on.
But anything you would need to maintain project management for a group of distributed people.
So actually, I didn't even know that. So if you've got a software project that you're working on, you decide you need a place for that code to live.
So people can download it and work on it or whatever. Then you can actually have a bug tracker and that's already kind of a part of SourceForge.
Correct. Oh, that's nice.
And right now we are rebuilding the SourceForge interface to provide those types of one-off services like bug tracker, forums, things like that to redesign them and make them easier to use.
I'm going to latch on to bug tracking because that's kind of like the thing that I know about, whereas a lot of that other stuff I don't.
But for instance, so this SourceForge bug tracker is a SourceForge bug tracker.
It's not like bugzilla or mantis or something. It's like its own little bug tracking system.
Correct. We previously, in fact, we still do support a mantis instance if you are tied to mantis and love mantis.
But we are, we also are building an integrated tracker that is more tightly integrated with any of the SourceForge management that you might choose to use.
So, or the wiki, say that you choose to use where our bug tracker can use sort of certain macros that would tie in to say a wiki page or a source code revision or a user or a project admin.
It makes it easier to input text and tie into your project services that are already existing.
Okay, very cool. Now the, the way that you get code two and from SourceForge, I would imagine, off the top of my head, I would guess SVN.
But do you guys do other stuff like Git and Mercurial or whatever?
Yes, we do. I want to say we do every source code management that is almost mainstream.
Bizarre, Mercurial, Git, Subversion, we still do CVS which is an old system but we do have a lot of people who really like using it and we plan on maintaining it into the future.
It coincidentally, we're rewriting our CVS service infrastructure over the next probably quarter to make it more robust in the future so that we can't support it longer.
I think I hit all of this source code repositories that we support.
Right. Okay, well one thing, I mean, it's funny because I knew about SourceForge like way back in the day before I even knew what SourceForge was because I'm a multimedia kind of guy and I downloaded Audacity and of course it's posted on SourceForge.
Right.
So it's just like, I've always known that name, never really understood what it was.
But that's the cool thing about SourceForge to me is that it's really friendly to even like the nucleus of Nubes.
I mean, they're a Mac user, they're a Windows user, they go to SourceForge.
I think I want to say it auto detects their OS now and kind of suggests, hey, you should be looking at this category or if you search for something, it shows you the stuff that's applicable to your OS.
And that's also dependent on the projects knowing how to navigate our system because say you submitted a new release of Audacity and you're an Audacity project.
Audacity project administrator or developer, you can say, I've got three new releases, once for Mac, once for Windows, once for Linux and then our system will supply that release that they specify.
So it's, that's another service that we offer to projects to make their lives easier and to get their software to users better.
So this is kind of a silly question, but I mean, out, let's say that I do have a software project, I do want to start posting on SourceForge.
Like, what's the, do I have to get it approved or do I just like sign up or what's the process?
There's no approval process.
Okay.
You create a user account and you create a project and you create a tool in your new project to say start up a new Git repository.
Right.
And as soon as that Git repository is created, it will provide you URLs that are associated with your project.
Okay.
You can even create source code repositories for your user instance.
So you don't even have to create a project anymore.
So say you created user ID, CLI-2, you could have a CLI-2 Git repository.
Oh, nice.
That would be CLI-2.Git.SourceForge.net.
Okay.
I'm paraphrasing that URL, but you get the idea.
Yeah, okay.
And that could, I mean, so if I just have some, I don't know, really handy shell scripts that I came up with that I just never want to partway there's something I could sort of like have that associated with my username.
Exactly.
Okay, I get it.
That's really cool.
Is there anything particularly unique, although I've actually heard a couple of things that I can think of off the top of my head,
that from your perspective, is there anything particularly unique about SourceForge over, for instance, I mean, you know, like there's a lot of those hosting sites out there like Launchpad and
Tutorials, GitHub, things like that, you know, like what is there anything?
The main differentiator for SourceForge is our download and distribution network.
When you go to say, you know, download Audacity, so to speak, in the background, the stuff that you don't see is we maintain a global list of mirrors.
And we distribute all those releases all over the world as soon as we can.
As soon as you upload something, we send it out to as many mirrors as possible.
So say a user in Korea wants to download software, they don't have to, you know, wait an hour to get it from a Chicago mirror or something like that.
And a lot of these other, you know, source code hosting websites, maybe they just package up a revision of the latest revision of Git and offer it's horrible.
Whereas we'll distribute the full binaries.
And we also support all the command line tools for downloads to like WGET or Coral stuff like that.
So, which is really handy for, you know, system administrators.
Yeah, but they strip to the updates and stuff like that.
Yeah, okay.
In fact, we just recently worked with a project who was hosting younger positives and we moved that into our download mirror network.
Oh, wow.
We were able to set up all their young packaging for their custom Linux OS through the global distribution network.
Okay.
So it's actually very flexible.
Yeah, it's really flexible.
And we have another project that's distributing Ubuntu app to repose through it.
Okay.
And we need to work with them to set that up on the mirror network.
So we try really hard to work as well as we can with the projects because we know it makes them successful.
What's your background, like personally, how did you get into this racket?
Well, my background is essentially Linux.
You know, I went to school for software programming, but I picked up a Linux box and I don't know Red Hat 7 or something.
Yeah.
And I just fell in love with it.
And, you know, I kind of did, you know, your random desktop IT support, like straight out of school.
And I just kept hammering away at Linux, knowing that that's what I wanted to do.
Yeah.
And luckily, you know, the industry sort of turning around and starting to use Linux enterprise-wide.
And I just, you know, source forage out of job opening.
Nice.
And we were a good fit because I'm such a Linux geek.
Yeah.
Very cool.
So.
I don't think I have any other questions.
If there's anything that you think I've missed, though, feel free to chime in.
No, the only thing I want to say is if you're interested or if you have any more questions or any of your listeners do, just hit us up on SourceForage channel in IRC.
Okay.
You usually have people there during, you know, North American working hours.
And we also have an email SFNet support that, you know, we answer questions through their SFNet support at sourceforage.com.
Okay.
Cool.
I hope that email address is right.
Well, we'll all find out together.
I don't have an in front of me.
All right.
Well, cool.
Thanks for the info.
Thanks for talking to me.
No problem.
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