This makes me feel old because I can honestly not remember whether SF has always been the steaming pile of sht it is today (before and after the redesign) or whether there was a brief period back in 200? where it was genuinely usable.
I do remember that at some point in history the downloads worked as expected with curl and wget. Then they invented the idiotic spoiler page with microscopic download links and for a long time the URLs were not working with wget (this has been fixed about a year ago, iirc - the idiotic spoiler page is still there, though).
I also remember that the mailing list archives and bugtrackers have always been as unusable as they still seem to be.
All I can say is: Die sourceforge, please just die. The days when "free CVS" was an argument are over. For as long as I can remember I have cringed in agony whenever I stumbled into yet another sourceforge download page. They are the plague. The new lipstick doesn't help at all. It just happens that the site that always felt like those shareware scams now also looks like one.
It's 2009, we have github, launchpad, google code and a dozen other OSS hosting providers. All of them beat SF hands down. Please don't use sourceforge. Thanks.
A while back (2002-200...4?), the site looked good. However, it was a usability nightmare from a development standpoint. I remember writing a script to queue CVS commits and do it when the commit side of the repos was actually working. There were times when you couldn't commit for days on end, and it was rare to have a week where you didn't have at least one day that it was effectively completely down.
Now the site works well for developers, except it's completely unusable for end-users. Come on, guys, get your act together.
I actually prefer if a download links to SF because the files are always there. Like with Google Code and some other providers, you know what you're getting.
The latest release was on June 25. Yesterday the big "download now" button was offering the May 30 release. Today it is offering the April 20 release. Yesterday I was at least able to look at the settings page to confirm that we had correctly set the June 25 release as the main download, but now I can't even find that.
Broken download links tell me: This project is abandoned, nobody even cares enough to update the links, stay away, don't waste your time.
This didn't ever happen with google code and the ilk to me, mind you, but only during those desperate "feeling lucky" google searches. Yes the sourceforge links may still work, but who wants a tarball from 2001?
I do remember that at some point in history the downloads worked as expected with curl and wget. Then they invented the idiotic spoiler page with microscopic download links and for a long time the URLs were not working with wget (this has been fixed about a year ago, iirc - the idiotic spoiler page is still there, though).
I also remember that the mailing list archives and bugtrackers have always been as unusable as they still seem to be.
All I can say is: Die sourceforge, please just die. The days when "free CVS" was an argument are over. For as long as I can remember I have cringed in agony whenever I stumbled into yet another sourceforge download page. They are the plague. The new lipstick doesn't help at all. It just happens that the site that always felt like those shareware scams now also looks like one.
It's 2009, we have github, launchpad, google code and a dozen other OSS hosting providers. All of them beat SF hands down. Please don't use sourceforge. Thanks.