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 boring
data processing work (instead of human beings wasting their time).
I first filed a request to sourceforge
(got removed lately).
Years passed with no answer, but the problem remained. The more I was thinking about it,
the more I realized the best solution would be getting an svn server to do all the
releasing when I tag the project. I was too lazy to start the project, until
a fine day when I wanted to register a new project at sourceforge it turned
out that it started to require 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 the web for the release process.
(This page is a friend of the Webless Initiative)