
SourceForge Hiding Fact That They Have Lost the Latest Revision of SVN? - slyall
https://medium.com/@jonykatz/sourceforge-hiding-fact-that-they-have-lost-the-latest-revision-of-svn-d221f2d68285
======
unilynx
They do admit something went wrong at the bottom of
[https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-
support/17328/](https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/17328/)

\-----

On Tuesday, April 10th between 00:40 UTC and 17:38 UTC, SourceForge
experienced a filesystem failure that affected a limited number of svn
commits, causing them not to be saved. We resolved the issue as soon as we
became aware of it, but commits from a small number of projects, including
yours, were affected. The best approach to recovery will be for yuu to do a
new fresh checkout and copy the changes over and make a new commit.

Sincerely, SourceForge Support

~~~
rdiddly
Okay, anybody know how to get in touch with this Yuu?

------
0x0
In [https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-
support/17417/](https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/17417/) :

"Unfortunately, we are unable to restore the missing commits, you will have to
commit them again. Thank you, SourceForge Support"

------
mmsimanga
I see quite a few comments asking the question why anyone still uses
Sourceforge in this day. I thought I would share some links to projects I use
almost on daily basis hosted on Sourceforge

\- SQL Squirrel[1] - SQL frontend.

\- ART[2] - A reporting tool. Simple BI tool that packs a punch

\- JasperServer[3] reporting server

\- Talend ETL [4]

I also download a number of portable apps[5]. All these are mature projects
that get frequent updates. I guess devs on these projects are fine with
Sourceforge. I have contributed a few patches on Sourceforge projects using
Mercurial. Experience wasn't to bad. I am saddened by events that have
happened at Sourceforge but I am grateful for these projects. I do hope they
can sort out the issues.
[1][http://www.squirrelsql.org/](http://www.squirrelsql.org/)
[2][http://art.sourceforge.net/](http://art.sourceforge.net/)
[3][https://community.jaspersoft.com/](https://community.jaspersoft.com/)
[4][https://sourceforge.net/projects/talend-
studio/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/talend-studio/)
[5][https://portableapps.com/](https://portableapps.com/)

~~~
dingaling
I am pleased when a project has a repository on Sourceforge as I can grab a
single tarball and sling it over to the dev machines ( no Internet connection
)

~~~
ptman
Why can't you do that when the project has a repository elsewhere?

------
isomorphic
Hey, maybe SVN can host its source on GitHu--oh, wait.

Seriously though, everyone loves GitHub now but it is a giant single point of
failure, just like SourceForge was back in the day. Git is more resilient
(local copies of history), but we would still have to go through the exercise
of migrating projects to a new home, notifying package maintainers and
everyone else, etc., etc. I mean, I like GitHub, but I also remember when the
Internet was federated.

~~~
thangalin
Since git is decentralized, moving elsewhere is a single command:

    
    
        git remote set-url origin <url>
    

Numerous alternatives exist:

* [https://notabug.org/](https://notabug.org/)

* [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/)

* [https://gitlab.com/](https://gitlab.com/)

* [https://allura.apache.org/](https://allura.apache.org/)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_hosting_facilities)

While GitHub is a massive repository, developers can change the origin with
ease if necessary.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
The github monoculture isn't about individuals setting their own repos so much
as items like submodules and issues and code depending on github. Go modules
use the github url in the import statements. GH is a lot more ingrained in the
community than SF ever was

~~~
majewsky
It's not like Go modules _must_ be hosted on Github. You can host Go modules
on any domain.

Github is just where most of the community is because of network effect.

------
loganabbott
Hi, president of SourceForge here. This issue affected a very small number of
projects (.03%) and they were contacted directly. It is very unfortunate but
we are not "hiding it".

Also, I see a lot of comments here not realizing SourceForge has been under
new ownership since 2016. Since we took over we immediately eliminated all
bundled adware, we also now scan all projects for malware, all downloads are
now over https, & more. Big redesign just rolled out too
[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/06/under...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/06/under-new-management-sourceforge-moves-to-put-badness-in-
past/)

We've taken steps to ensure we never lose any commits again.

------
ahmedalsudani
Good God. I thought the management change would actually mean no more
boneheaded moves.

------
preinheimer
No update/acknowledgement on their twitter:
[https://twitter.com/sfnet_ops](https://twitter.com/sfnet_ops)

------
wcoenen
This is nothing compared to the bundleware fiasco in 2015. Surely that should
have been enough to lose trust in SourceForge and abandon it?

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/05/sourc...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-
in-bundle-pushing-adware/)

~~~
creatonez
Sourceforge immediately pulled the plug on all of this when they were bought
out a while back

------
BurpIntruder
Choose bad tools, expect bad outcomes.

------
bb88
So, has anyone ever been to svnhub.com?

>>SVNHub Isn't necessary because GitHub supports Subversion!

------
linkmotif
They were down for two weeks? Didn’t announce it? Still had users when they
returned? Wow!

------
paulie_a
The two dozen sourceforge users left will be devastated.

I honestly won't download anything from that site anymore. If it isn't
infected with their adware, I just assume it is outdated and/or comprised with
malware.

~~~
srean
I think you are talking about a different sourceforge. The business has
changed hands multiple times.

~~~
chrisseaton
Is that a good thing? Who owns it now and what is their motivation?

~~~
srean
[https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-
fut...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-
plans/) discussed here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219)

[https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-the-new-
sourceforge...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-the-new-sourceforge/)
discussed here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108750)

------
ckdarby
tl;dr If you're stuck with svn repo mirror this to a git repo. Sourceforge has
no use any more and has a bad rep.

------
mattbillenstein
Why do people still use this garbage?

~~~
vortico
For many projects, the <30 minutes required to switch to another provider and
source control software is more than they consider it to be worth.

~~~
ams6110
I think the impact on most non-trivial projects is quite a bit more than 30
minutes. If you have all of your development processes, tools, testing, and
release-building built around SVN, switching to git would be a fairly major
undertaking, and if your project is working well with SVN, why would you want
to change?

~~~
gmueckl
Besides, Sourceforge services are much more encompassing than Github. Mailing
lists, forums, a structured download area where you can find stuff...

------
fenollp
Way to move to the blockchain!

Seriously though this is bad. Plenty of software still lives there. Are there
any backups so that humanity doesn’t loose a huge part of open source history?

------
scarface74
Most companies in 2018, shouldn’t be hosting their own data center at all. If
Netflix of all companies thought it made more sense to move all of their
infrastructure to AWS when Amazon is a competitor, that should tell most other
companies something.

~~~
scarface74
_This is a dangerous idea and a dangerous trend. I’m not a blockchains
obsessed federate /decentralize everything person either but putting
increasingly large amounts of the internet in increasingly fewer buckets is
dangerous to the internet as a whole. No one is perfect and no one is immune.
We should haver fewer single points of failure, not more. That also says
nothing about how notoriously petty big tech companies get in areas they
compete._

So you mean you shouldn’t depend on a central location to keep your source
control and move to a more distributed system where every committer has the
entire source control history?

As you can see, that opinion is getting downvoted a lot....

But back to the point. You can have the best of both worlds if you don’t
completely trust AWS and you still want to take advantage of their
infrastructure - use an AWS volume gateway in stored mode. You then have a
local copy on prem and it’s automatically backed up redundantly to AWS.

And if your data center goes down. Bring up a VM and reattach the AWS hosted
volume in cached mode and you’re in business.

I don’t see what the controversy is about. Sourceforge just proved that both
trusting SVN for your source code in 2018 isn’t the best approach and that
they aren’t competent enough to be trusted running their own infrastructure.
When have you heard a story about AWS losing data if you went with their
recommended best practices?

------
scarface74
I can’t feel bad for him.

Two questions:

Why is he still using SVN in 2018? This wouldn’t have happened with Git. If
our hosted git repo got hosed, it would be a simple matter of sending out a
slack message and the developer who did the latest push, repushing the code.

Why is he still using SourceForge? They wrapped software in malware and
adware. Even if the new owners don’t. Why would anyone trust them?

~~~
olliej
SVN is still perfectly acceptable for many users and developers. Yes git may
be superior for x, y, and z, but if you have a bunch of infrastructure set up
around svn then you have to weigh the “benefits” of git over the cost of
migration.

I know for many purposes git’s lack of monotonically increasing version
numbers makes tasks that are trivial in svn much harder. To the extent that
many projects are investigating commit hooks that literally modify commit data
to include a revision number.

Let’s be clear here though: I am not saying git is bad. What I’m saying is
that git may not be a trivial switch, or superior feature set, for everyone
out there.

That said - it’s always amazing to see anyone still using sourceforge (or that
it still exists) precisely because of things like this, or the malware
injection they were doing a few years ago, etc

~~~
scarface74
I setup a process at my last job that added the git hash as part of building
dll’s and executables. It’s not that hard. We didn’t do branches or use the
typical git flow workflow. If you needed to do a hot fix to code in
production, you simply looked at the file version that’s part of the Windows
metadata, created a branch, released it and merged it back into master.

EDIT:

Wow, looking at the downvotes, the SVN fans are coming out in force.

~~~
raarts
Well, you didn't address the 'monotonically increasing version numbers' part
at all, while still proclaiming: 'it's not that hard'.

