Alioth moving toward pagure

1. It's landing pages are designed for the user of the package, as opposed to the developer. So links to a versioned(!) download area, documentation, bugs and mailing lists are prominent. The button to fork the project is harder to find.

2. It is VCS agnostic - it supports all the common ones.

3. It can be completely scripted, by which I mean after doing the development of the next version on my laptop or whatever, a "make upload" is all that is required to update the release area, home page, and VCS on sourceforge. In fact if it weren't for responding to bug reports there would be no need for me to visit SourceForge at all after creating the project.

This apparently isn't to most people tastes. It appears that developers prefer their hosting sites to function primarily communicating channel for developers. But for me it's bliss.

This state of affairs lasted until I became so enamored with it, I decided I'd try and package it for Debian. The installation instructions of "here is a VM we've created for you" weren't encouraging, and it turned out they were like that for a reason. The Allura devs mode of operation seems to be to pull in other projects as needed, hack them into something they can use, then not contribute any of their changes upstream.

In other words, unsupportable by anyone else.

That said, it's currently a good fit for the current Aloith. It also runs on software that has never been packages for Debian, and judging by the years of unfixed bug reports and requests for help [0], is unusable by anybody who doesn't have admin rights to the machine so they can fix it when it breaks.

Maybe pagure will mark the start of a new era. Here's hoping.

[0] https://alioth.debian.org/tracker/?atid=200001&group_...