Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
About Me
- Andrew Dalke
- I am an American living in Göteborg, Sweden. I make my living writing software for computational chemistry and biology, usually in Python.
14 comments:
Re SF: You *can* curl the file from prdownloads.sf.net/project/filename-x.y.tar.gz. I do it all the time.
According to this: http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/sun-oracle-community-continuity.html and this: http://blogs.sun.com/projectkenai/entry/the_future_of_kenai_com Project Kenai is going to be "discontinued."
Have you considered using Google Code. The mailing lists (Google Groups) do require a Google Account but that's not much of a barrier to entry.
Maybe you can enlarge your option set if you set up a mailing list independently from the project hosting. You can host your mailing list on librelist.
Hi Noel. Really? If I try to download OpenBabel's source at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openbabel/files/openbabel/2.2.3/openbabel-2.2.3.tar.gz/download I get a "302 Found" message, which curl doesn't follow. If I follow it manually I get to http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openbabel/openbabel/2.2.3/openbabel-2.2.3.tar.gz?use_mirror=switch which returns an empty document, where the header contains the direct URL.
Hi Ade! Thanks for pointing out those announcements, which include "Project Kenai, however, will be discontinued for public use." Wow, can you say "bad timing"? I started with Kenai about two days before the announcements were made. Go me!
As for Google Code, I mentioned in my posting that I didn't like its requirement that all list members have a Google account. I'm quite serious about not wanting that extra barrier to entry at all.
It seems I was wrong.
You can do a lot with a Google Group without needing a Google account: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46438 but it requires you to make your mailing list open. That may leave you vulnerable to spam.
You should also consider some combination of a service like BitBucket/Google Code/etc and obtaining the remaining functionality from other services.
Hi cool-RR! I didn't know of any good mailing list hosts, so I didn't go that route. librelist is Zed Shaw's new project, and is a possibility I'll look into.
Some of the project provider interfaces really make it hard to use a mailing list hosted elsewhere. For example, Kenai's navigation has a "mailing lists" link, which only shows the lists they host and there's no way to override it.
And to Ade, hi again! Some of what you said overlaps with cool-RR's suggestion, so I'll not repeat myself. Regarding Google Groups and non-subscribers, it says one can join "a public Google Group via email", but I don't see any instructions for how to do that. I went to their feed for comp.lang.python using a browser which doesn't have my login cookie. That should be a public group, yes?
When I tried to post it said I needed a Google account, and I saw no instructions about how to join, or post to the public list, through the email interface. This ends up being like Project Kenai, where it's possible to be a non-site member on the list, but you have to really search it out.
I'll poke the team about getting the Help information updated.
In the meantime you can join a group by following the instructions here: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46606
It seems you just need to send an email to: [Groupname]+subscribe@googlegroups.com
@Andrew: To clarify, I use wget. I presumed that curl can do everything that wget can. Here's the commandline: "wget http://prdownloads.sf.net/openbabel/openbabel-2.2.3.tar.gz".
Some thoughts about your requirements: I'd take a look at any other candidates mentioned on the Mercurial hosting page:
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MercurialHosting
Although you've covered a few, maybe one of the others fits the bill. As for the Google Code option, I have some involvement in administering groups hosted on Google Groups and the spam can be a real pain: lots of moderator requests about messages mentioning some spammer's "funny video", probably from spammers using Google Mail.
There's always the option of hosting stuff yourself. I noticed that WebFaction, who ran python-hosting.com a while back before discontinuing that free service, offered Mailman lists, and you could probably install a few other services if you felt you had the time to do so. (I use WebFaction myself, for the record, but other providers probably offer very similar services.)
To an extent, maybe this is something that could be packaged up somewhat: despite enthusiasm for all-in-one solutions like Trac, I can see a lot of merit in something like hgwebdir plus Mailman plus MoinMoin plus Roundup (if you really needed it).
At work, I have to maintain ViewVC plus MediaWiki plus Bugzilla, so my suggestion isn't rocket science, especially in light of how awful Bugzilla can be.
Turns out my web hosting provider also supports two free Mailman-based mailing lists for my account, so I've decided to go with that and use Google Code. The new project site is at http://code.google.com/p/chem-fingerprints/ .
@baoilleach: Turns out that I need a "-L" to tell curl follow location redirects. Here all this time I've been switching to links for SF downloads!
@Paul: I looked at the hosting providers you pointed to. Firefly was the most interesting, but at this point I got sick of looking at providers for what's really a rather small project, so I stopped worrying about it.
@cool-RR: I looked at librelist but had a tough time figuring out how the list archives worked. It was very confusing. Since I already had the ability to do a Mailman list, I went with that option.
Splitting the mailing lists was a smart call - unfortunately spam control is expensive and an otherwise good service might not want to dedicate a high percentage of their support costs to one feature.
Both Google Code and BitBucket are good choices - since your using Mercurial if things get popular you might even use both to streamline the process of following fork changes on BitBucket by pushing to both sites. I've even experimented with this approach and hg-git to avoid pushing everyone to follow my preferences.
Hey Andrew,
Have you come across Librelist yet?
It seems like it would fit your requirements for a mailing list, and then you could choose any other code hosting provider you wanted.
Oy! and two comments up, there's your reason for not choosing it. Sorry for the noise :-(
It seems that you have already found your solution, but I still want to add my 2 cents re Gooogle groups for the benefit of others: recently (a few weeks ago), without notice, Google has started to sent out notifications of messages awaiting moderator approval (because it thinks they are spam) only in batches and often with SEVERAL DAYS delay. For the TurboGears project we set up ticket and post-commit notifications that come from dedicated sender addresses which are subscribed to the respective groups. There is NO way in the group settings to whitelist these addresses.
I'm seriously considering switching away from Google groups because of this and hosting the mailing list myself though it would be a pain for our users.
Post a Comment