History of repo.hu
I had been hosting project at sourceforge
for a long time. I found the web UI particularly annoying all the years
I was at sourceforge and after a while I noticed that releases of some
of my projects are delayed because I was too lazy to fight the web UI again.
I sat down to think it over, and I concluded that the only way "Release Early,
Release Often" can be achieved is to convert the release process semi-automatic.
In case you do not use sourceforge, here is how the process of creating a
new release looked like:
- write changelog and release notes
- tag trunk/ (this is needed to keep the svn repo clean, not for sourceforge)
- create all the difference tarballs from the tag (this part could be automated)
- upload them to sourceforge using ftp
- register the new release on the web page
- upload changelog and release notes
- set a lot of uninteresting fields in web forms
- create a news item (web forms again)
Starting from the first sourceforge interaction (ftp upload)
the process usually took more than 15 minutes of pure repetitive
web form filling. I believe computers were design to do this kind of work.
I first filed a request to sourceforge.
Years passed with no answer, but the problem remained. The more I was thinking about,
the more I realized the best solution would be getting an svn server to do all the
releasing when I tag the project. As usual, I was too lazy to start the project, until
a fine day when I wanted to register a new project at sourceforge and it turned
out that this requires javascript. I found this totally insane so sent them
a
request or bugreport about it. It took a week to get an answer, and the
answer was that the site was designed for javascript users. This was the moment
I decided to leave sourceforge and set up a service for my own use that works
without administrative overhead.
The service outputs to the web, but doesn't expect the developers to
use web for releasing.
(This page is a friend of the Webless Initiative)