No more updates for Freecode [LWN.net]

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 26, 2014 11:37 UTC (Thu) by Riba78 (guest, #84615)
Parent article: No more updates for Freecode

I was a long-time user. Freshmeat was killed already years back by "updating" it. Old version was clunky category+search style engine. It was updated to a new version that was based on tags+search. The new one just never worked right. Probably there was issues with transferring the metadata and there was not enough people to go through all the software and re-apply correct metadata. People complained and begged in the support forums for the site to go back to the old engine but to no avail.

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Human effort

Posted Jun 30, 2014 16:26 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Yes, that was an utterly stupid change: someone imbued with "social" karma thought that tags were somehow better than categories and replaced them. From that point on, Freshmeat was not even good for trove searches (e.g. to look at programming language popularity).

And, as some other commenters said above, the step of requesting human approval was unneeded and uncalled for. Modern package managers (PyPI, npm) work completely without human intervention: you want to publish a package, you just press a button. Removing human approval would have been an improvement (no more waiting for updates) and would have lowered operating costs. Contrast this automated approach with the walled garden of iOS apps which require human approval; on npm we are all adults.

Please, please someone create an automated version of FreshMeat (libre software only) which doesn't suck.