Tag Archives: sourceforge

cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source

the new bug tracker on sourceforge

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A while ago Sourceforge gave me the offer to upgrade curl’s bug tracker to “the new one” they offer. They do offer some arguments to why you would want to do this but they don’t elaborate much on the transition for existing projects. Since I’ve been annoyed and disappointed on the old one for years I decided to dive right in. I decided to post this blog entry to possibly encourage others as well, or at least explain how upgrading worked for us.

I’ll start by explaining a bit about what’s so bad about the old Sourceforge bug tracker. Anyone who has tried to use it for anything “real” most likely already know about these things and then I figure my list can be used for a comparison if we’ve gotten annoyed by the same things.

  1. They use a global bug id which makes all bug entries get very large numbers that aren’t in sequence and are fairly hard to remember.
  2. You can’t respond to bug reports by mail, so you are forced to use the heavy ad-filled web site.
  3. Ridiculous URLs to the bug tracker and each individual bug entry. I created a bounce CGI years ago on the curl web site to avoid having to use the overly long ones anywhere.
  4. When sending out email notifications, it prepends the new comments while having the older ones below which basically is an odd-order top-posting style a lot of people and projects have a hard time to get accustomed to.
The new tracker addresses all of these issues and I agreed to allow it to make curl use their new tracker. And this is the outcome:
  • All the existing bug tracker entries were converted. They all now get numbered sequentially in a private number series so no more bug #31234234 and instead the 1100 or so bug reports became bug #1 to bug #1169.
  • The new bug entries have a different set of meta-data but the ‘status’ and ‘owner’ etc seemed to get translated pretty good. The new ‘milestone’ got populated wrongly for me, but it didn’t matter much to me because I simply cleared it.
  • There’s no visible way to translate from old style bug numbers to the new bug numbers. When I go to the URL for the old number it redirects me to the new bug so clearly sourceforge has created a look-up table it can use.
  • There’s now a sensible public URL to point out the “home” for the curl bug tracking.

Annoying things with the new tracker:

  • It splits up a the comments to a single report into several “pages” far too early and forces you to click through annoying “page 2” or “next page” links to see the latest comments.

Summary: the upgrade was totally worth it. A much better bug tracker with much more useful interfaces, both the web interface and the ability to respond to it by email etc. And still room for improvements!

Open Source

15K commits and counting

Almost two years ago I blogged about me reaching 10K commits as counted by ohloh.net.

Just a few days ago their counter counting my commits surpassed 15K and right now it says: 15005 commits and 46 kudos – ranked #69 of 273705. I think more of my projects have found its way there since then rather than me actually having committed 5000 times since then!

On sourceforge I’m now member of 19 projects (most of them are stalled). The latest addition is pycurl, which I’m basically a member of in order to try to help getting more people involved.

(The image is dynamically generated so when you read the old blog post it looks a little funny since it says the current numbers now…)

Open Source

ipwhere on sourceforge

I finally got around to add my ipwhere project to sourceforge and I’ve just imported the source code into the SVN repo, so now it’ll be a bit easier to cooperate on this project.

ipwhere is a tool that looks up and presents the country and city of a specified IP adress. It has the entire lookup table built-in so the result is instant. Of course the downside is that it needs to be updated every now and then to prevent the data from growing too old and irrelevant! It uses the geomapping info from hostip.info.

It is the 18th project on sourceforge that I’m a member of, and the 16th I admin.

Open Source

10K Commits

ohloh.net counts my commits done in 11 different open projects over roughly the last 8 years. (I am a member of 17 projects on sourceforge, but the remainders are old and/or dead projects.)

I’ve now truly surpassed 10,000 public commits, making roughly 3.5 commits per day over the years! Clearly that number and the number of people giving me “kudos” on the site makes me rated #55 out of 83,000. At least currently, my rating is slowly falling…

ohloh profile for Daniel Stenberg

Anyway, since I’m a fan of stats and numbers, I encourage you to register your own projects and contributions there!

Maybe we should form a 10K commit club? 😉