Better open-source hosting: SourceForge is looking weak

September 17, 2008 📬 Get My Weekly Newsletter

I currently host my Vim Javadoc doclet on SourceForge and every time I have to deal with it, it's just a monumental pain. The documentation is insanely long and detailed, the website looks horribly out of date and cruddy, and when compared to stuff like GitHub and Lighthouse, it's almost embarrassing how difficult it is to deal with and how bad the UI is (despite my best efforts, it still insists that the featured download is the vimdoc samples and not the doclet itself. WTF?).

I'm already hosting the code in GitHub and just moved my tickets to Lighthouse. The only thing left is where to host binary downloads and static assets. For RESTUnit, I'm using Google Code, which is pretty easy to deal with (about a zillion times simpler and easier than SourceForge), however it has no facility for hosting arbitrary HTML. Currently, I'm just using my website for static assets.

While I do like the new Web-2.0 way of doing things (one site like GitHub really focusing on source, another like Lighthouse just does ticketing, etc. and they integrate via web services), I'm not sure where the best place is to host downloads and static assets. I would need programmatic access and some liberal download/diskspace quotas for sure. It would also be nice to be able to connect to other services, for example generate a changelog based on commits or tickets closed since the last release.