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SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 27 Jun 2012, 20:01
by sireus
Yup, Sourceforge will permanently shut down all hosted apps on September 1, 2012. This isn't exactly the latest news, but I only saw it today. Might be relevant to some projects around here.
http://sourceforge.net/blog/hosted-apps-retirement/

PS: I'm also quite curious why they didn't send out a mail to project admins at least. Did anyone get something in that direction?

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 27 Jun 2012, 21:58
by Knitter
sireus {l Wrote}:PS: I'm also quite curious why they didn't send out a mail to project admins at least. Did anyone get something in that direction?

I received an e-mail with that announcement. I believe I have chosen to receive updates from SF on my SF account settings.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 27 Jun 2012, 23:54
by sireus
Well, I have that box checked too (if you mean the "Receive Site Update Email Alerts (Low traffic and includes security notices.)" one), and it looks like I'm getting that stuff (last update on June 15). Weird.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 00:01
by DangerOnTheRanger
That's sad to hear. [selfish-remark] Good thing I was already using project web space. :) [/selfish-remark]

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 04:11
by charlie
It is annoying, as at least one of my projects uses Trac significantly and the web space doesn't support Python afaik but the web space now supports Python so it can be migrated there (hat tip).

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 05:25
by andrewj
I never received an email about this, and I get the regular update mails and it wasn't mentioned in them either. Bit slack on their part.

The phasing out doesn't affect me much, I had a phpbb3 forum with it, but it was really slow to use and un-customisable and hence I migrated to a manually installed SMF forum ages ago.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 06:46
by qubodup
charlie {l Wrote}:It is annoying, as at least one of my projects uses Trac significantly and the web space doesn't support Python afaik.

https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourc ... ject%20web - looks like it does support Python. Lucky.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 10:13
by Knitter
sireus {l Wrote}:Well, I have that box checked too (if you mean the "Receive Site Update Email Alerts (Low traffic and includes security notices.)" one), and it looks like I'm getting that stuff (last update on June 15). Weird.


I may be making a mistake, between e-mails and twitter updates I know I've received noticed about the hosted apps going down and I think it was by e-mail, so don't really take my word for it... I've tried searching for that e-mail but either I made a mistake or I've already deleted it.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 10:40
by amuzen
This is quite bad news for me since I use the Trac hosted app for my largish wiki. I preferred hosted apps over deploying and maintaining my own, and I will particularly miss people being able to use the SF.net account to log in.

On the other hand, now I have a good reason to integrate the wiki to the project website. I hope that the better site integration will be worth the pain of manually migrating those 69 articles to the slightly syntax incompatible Drupal wiki. :eew:

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 10:57
by Knitter
Trac is the only app I'll miss, I still don't know if it will be worth the effort of maintaining my own issue tracking system or just switch back to the SF provided one. Most of my projects use Trac and I'm quite used to it, it will be a pain to have to manually maintain anything else or revert to SF issue tacking system.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 19:21
by rbowen
charlie {l Wrote}:It is annoying, as at least one of my projects uses Trac significantly and the web space doesn't support Python afaik.


You can indeed install Trac in your project web, and I am, even today, working on the migration document.

--Rich (SourceForge community guy)

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 20:15
by ctsai
amuzen {l Wrote}:This is quite bad news for me since I use the Trac hosted app for my largish wiki. I preferred hosted apps over deploying and maintaining my own, and I will particularly miss people being able to use the SF.net account to log in.

On the other hand, now I have a good reason to integrate the wiki to the project website. I hope that the better site integration will be worth the pain of manually migrating those 69 articles to the slightly syntax incompatible Drupal wiki. :eew:


Note that we're going to be rolling out an OpenID service, so you should still be able to have folks authenticate to their SourceForge accounts. From the blog post:
One major aspect of this customization was the ability to authenticate against SourceForge.net accounts, and we’ll be adding OpenID support very soon in order to replace the functionality that you’d otherwise be losing here.


----

Knitter {l Wrote}:Trac is the only app I'll miss, I still don't know if it will be worth the effort of maintaining my own issue tracking system or just switch back to the SF provided one. Most of my projects use Trac and I'm quite used to it, it will be a pain to have to manually maintain anything else or revert to SF issue tacking system.


We currently use Trac for our support ticketing system. Switching to tickets on the new SourceForge platform (codenamed Allura). If you're interested in making a similar move, I'd be happy to compare notes if you like.

Regards,
Chris Tsai, SourceForge.net Support

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 21:07
by DangerOnTheRanger
If you guys need a hosted Trac instance, why not set one up on TuxFamily? I can personally testify maintaining a Trac instance is pretty simple, though you have to jump through a virtualenv hoop or two in the specific case of TuxFamily when you're installing for the first time.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 28 Jun 2012, 21:19
by sireus
Yeah, sure, but it could be done on SF Project Web just as well. But either way, you have to maintain the stuff, and even though it's simple, it's something you have to take care of.
For me at least, hosted apps were a significant selling point of SF. It was pretty much the only thing that set them apart from e.g. Github, who for some reason only have their own solutions. And those are just no match for something like Trac (yet).

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 29 Jun 2012, 19:08
by charlie
rbowen {l Wrote}:
charlie {l Wrote}:It is annoying, as at least one of my projects uses Trac significantly and the web space doesn't support Python afaik.


You can indeed install Trac in your project web, and I am, even today, working on the migration document.

--Rich (SourceForge community guy)


Hi Rich, thanks for taking the time to come here and let us know. I've amended my post to remove confusion.

Re: SF phasing out hosted apps

PostPosted: 03 Jul 2012, 15:39
by Knitter
ctsai {l Wrote}:We currently use Trac for our support ticketing system. Switching to tickets on the new SourceForge platform (codenamed Allura). If you're interested in making a similar move, I'd be happy to compare notes if you like.


I don't suppose there is any automated/semi-automated way of migrating from Trac to the Allura ticket system? I see that the current migration docs are targeted towards a migration from the hosted Trac to a manually installed Trac version, any docs on how to move to Allura ticket system with minimal loss?

I don't really mind moving the tickets by hand since most projects have few (less than 100) tickets, but would prefer not to lose some of the history (version dates, ticket dates and authors, etc.).

I'll start to look at it in one of the smaller projects, let's see what I can do.