NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On 8/26/05, Mark Withington <mwithington at plmresearch.com> wrote:
> Mitch,
> 
> Out of curiosity, was there any problem with Gforge, or was it just the box
> it was running on and political issues gaining control?

First off, I inherited this server nearly a year ago, as it had been
abandoned by the previous maintainer. I had no idea what was going on,
and logged in to look around. I went into a directory called
gforge-3.3, only to find (to my horror) that I was managing a cvs
development snapshot of Gforge 4.0 before it had gone stable.

Adding insult to injury, this was after gforge-4.0 was stable. So I
was stuck on a horribly broken snapshot of a version, with too many
projects/people/lists to easily and safely migrate to the final
version.

The only political part about MamboForge was that it was hosted on a
single processor entry-level system at EV1, and we had numerous
(dozens) of offers for hosting on enterprise-grade hardware. All of
these offers were refused, and we continued to limp along on the
kiddie-server. As they say in the Hefty commercial, "wimpy wimpy
wimpy!" ;-)

Now we (the core developers and community) are free to accept outside
help, and will be announcing next week our new home. It is a
completely different picture when you have talented, experienced
organizations offering to help and you are empowered to accept it :-D

I don't really have any problems with Gforge now, however you do need
to see how many developers are working on it, and how much community
support you are going to find. As fas as I could tell, Gforge was a
one-man-army (Tim Perdue), and IMHO that's not enough resources to
make a project on the scale of Gforge go. Gforge is a big beast, with
a lot of working parts - that means too many different areas of
technology for any one person to master, even though I have tremendous
respect for Tim's knowledge in these areas.

--
Mitch Pirtle
OpenSourceMatters.org