GetDeb (aka PlayDeb) discontinued

[Redi44]

Hi,
the man behind GetDeb project just announced that he discontinued the project. So I think it would be good to delete the link on the webpage.

Also it would be great if somebody from the devs could create PPA on Launchpad for Red Eclipse so we could continue to play it...

Thank you

[CancukTux]

Play deb, one of the popular method for getting up-to-date version of Red Eclipse, has been discontinued. This means debian users not on the most recent release will have trouble intalling up to date versions, as LTS version and such only have outdated versions in the repo's.

What do you think the RE community should do? Should we rely on people manually downloading the latest one or using stand alone programs such as DJL to keep up to date. Maybe we should host our own repository?

(Mod edit: This post was merged from a duplicate thread)

[arand]

I've done most of the packaging work for Debian/Ubuntu, and I try to keep the latest versions available through the standard means, the current status is:

Ubuntu 12.04 precise: 1.2 (old)
Ubuntu 12.04 precise-backports: 1.3.1
Ubuntu 12.10 quantal: 1.3.1
Debian wheezy/testing: 1.2 (old)
(no backports for wheezy since it's still unreleased)
Debian experimental: 1.3.1

If you're using backports, that will keep you reasonably fresh, even for LTS.
I know that some prefer PPAs though, so I might revive the PPA I've used for various Ubuntu builds in the past, if there's a considerable interest?

[qreeves]

I am actually considering moving our distribution entirely to Desura. They offer standalone downloads alongside the internal install process. This would give me an easy way to do auto updates and possibly even stats/accolades (Desura's achievements).

Sourceforge staff and the company in general have pushed me past breaking point, both with their nagging me publicly/privately to upgrade to the mess that is Allura, and with refusing to fix basic project issues despite not providing the alternatives or migration instructions they use as an excuse each time. At this point, I'm looking at ditching them, because if I have to deal with my own project issues and resort to self hosting, I don't see why I should give them our advertising revenue.

[Evropi]

As for Desura, I'm not sure if that will be a good thing for Red Eclipse. Downloads from it are terribly, painfully slow. I also think it would reduce the rate of people trying out Red Eclipse. I like the idea of the service, it supports responsible software licensing (I can get in bed with proprietary, I just don't like it when it locks out competitors/forces DRM - which I've had bad experiences with) and the client code is open, which is an added bonus in their favour, though I have yet to see the fruit of 'Desurium'.

Huh, why do you dislike Allura? I think it's a definite improvement, and, while it's not perfect, it is an important advance in usability. And the difference from GitHub is, the code is open. Isn't it a little hypocritical to host open source projects on closed-source platforms such as Bitbucket and GitHub?

Anyway, since you're touching up the site... how about making it a little more standards-compliant and stop enforcing quirks mode? Nudge nudge wink wink.

[qreeves]

As for Desura, I'm not sure if that will be a good thing for Red Eclipse. Downloads from it are terribly, painfully slow. I also think it would reduce the rate of people trying out Red Eclipse. I like the idea of the service, it supports responsible software licensing (I can get in bed with proprietary, I just don't like it when it locks out competitors/forces DRM - which I've had bad experiences with) and the client code is open, which is an added bonus in their favour, though I have yet to see the fruit of 'Desurium'.

Huh, why do you dislike Allura? I think it's a definite improvement, and, while it's not perfect, it is an important advance in usability. And the difference from GitHub is, the code is open. Isn't it a little hypocritical to host open source projects on closed-source platforms such as Bitbucket and GitHub?

Downloads from SourceForge are terribly, painfully slow, so I don't see it making much of a difference. The point is, I dislike Allura, both the way it looks and the way it operates. If I wanted a half-assed all-in-one platform I would not have started to use the Hosted Apps, which they are discontinuing and refusing to provide support for now, despite having almost nothing in place to migrate the existing data to the project web services.

This is indicative of the slow but steady decline SourceForge has been going through over the years. The staff have lost perspective, and they keep trying desperate attempts to "revitalise" the site without properly thinking it through before going ahead and implementing it. We were given less than two months to "migrate Hosted Apps or lose the data forever", which has since been revised because they are unable to provide migration instructions.

Now, they've decided the solution is to badger all project administrators into the "opt-in upgrade to Allura" (I have not only been pestered by this all over the site and news feed, but also privately via email). I believe they are hoping everyone will start using Allura and not need the Hosted App migration instructions by the end of it. This is not the case for Red Eclipse. Allura's layout attempts to force things like the builtin wiki and tracker on you (I know it's not mandatory, but the interface severely lacks without it). Basically, SourceForge is ignoring those of us who are happy with the current implementations they have for wiki/tracker/etc.

Anyway, since you're touching up the site... how about making it a little more standards-compliant and stop enforcing quirks mode? Nudge nudge wink wink.

A critical look at the website, from a coder's point of view, is on the cards; it used to be entirely compliant but people like fancy things like sliding thumbnail views, etc. The website "works" for now, so it isn't a high priority.

[TheLastProject]

While I completely understand your idea of moving over to Desura exclusively, it would be great if Red Eclipse would stay available for download on other locations as well (at least the source code), so that different Linux distributions keep the opportunity to add it to their repositories. I really, really like how Linux package managers can be used to keep pretty much the entire system and all content up-to-date in one "click" (or command, in my case), and I would definitely like it to stay this way, and I fear moving towards Desura-exclusive releases will severely harm this.

I do completely understand that you're fed up with SourceForge after hearing about such treatment, though, and I am by no way trying to force you to stay with SourceForge.

[Dratz-_C]

quin,
I am currently at 315Kbps getting red eclipse with desura. Sourceforge never went over 150.Kbps and frequently was 100.Kbps. Webpages load promptly in desura. Sourceforge has always been slow for me. Speed wise I say go for it. I think communication about the development version could probably happen over normal desura channels. I cannot be sure because I have no developer account. You given the present circumstances are happier with it. I already feel that for all intents and purposes desura is a step up from sourceforge. At least this forum and the chat are independent of sourceforge so they will be here if and when you migrate to desura. The only part I like about sourceforge is the trac timeline which was useful although admittedly again slow, and the colored deviation summary. With these features in jeopardy I have nothing left to hold onto.
anybody else,
Try desura and see if it works for you. Click on games, put red eclipse in the search box and in the results click on red eclipse game or company. For a speed test, install and download the game even when you have it already.
TheLastProject,
I wish I knew how to update with the click of a button to the latest windows development version using the differential.
Cheers

[TheLastProject]

TheLastProject,
I wish I knew how to update with the click of a button to the latest windows development version using the differential.
Cheers

The ways written down on the wiki will hopefully help you with keeping the development version of Red Eclipse up-to-date: https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/redeclipse/index.php?title=Obtain_development_version#Windows.

The point is that, under GNU/Linux, I can run one command to update my whole system (under the system that I use, Gentoo, that would be "emerge -uDN world", but other distributions have other commands and often graphical tools). If Red Eclipse moves to Desura, I'll have to manually update it, and start and log into Desura to play it after a few more clicks, and can't just type "redeclipse" to start the game. Sure, they're only small inconveniences, but still a step backwards from the user's side. I do complete understand that SourceForge can be annoying, though, and I'd love to actually help instead of just complain that it'll be a small inconvenience for me (although I don't know how I could be helpful here).

[qreeves]

Desirable wouldn't replace anything but SourceForge itself. We are still yet to look over the legal stuff too, nothing about this is definite. If we migrate, I can move our svn, wiki, and trac installs to play.redeclipse.net (already investigating this). Not one thing about how others distribute the product will change

[Dratz-_C]

quin,
Legal stuff always is a lot of reading and second opinions. Your report sounds positive. I am interested in hearing your continued findings.
TheLastProject,
I would like to thank you for your help in finding me a guide for svn updating in the wiki. (Tortoisesvn downloaded at 207Kbps from sourceforge ... but my processor type is unsupported by the installation package. Now I am getting the unofficial svn bundle which seem will work fine.)
Cheers

[qreeves]

The other thing to bear in mind is that most distributions take a while for new releases to enter the main pool, leaving you with an outdated copy for what can sometimes be months. Thanks to some tireless work, mostly by arand, a large number of high profile distributions stay reasonably up to date. Being included is both a blessing and a curse, and we often complain at how long this process can take, but in the end it is like free advertising.

Desura would auto update, straight after we push a release to it. As Desura doesn't provide development related things we will roll our own, and it will be no different to sourceforge (except for the fact that we can actually fix problems when they arise). This will solve the issue for those with a "Steam Auto Update" mentality, while maintaining a good open source development structure.

I have eihrul countering that we could roll our own auto updater, but I'm dubious if we would ever get this done to an acceptable level. I want to keep focus on the future, for things like the paid-for spinoffs, and the like (commercial opportunities will let me turn this from an unpaid hobby that consumes all my time into a living). Desura has the facilities for that, without the cost/risk associated with trying to get on Steam. I think at the very least, Desura would be a good trial run for any future Steam plans (Desura still lacks Mac support, Steam is still working the bugs out of the Linux one).

[Evropi]

Hey, that seems fair. I'd still prefer binary distribution to be made through SourceForge.

I like to put source code hosts in two categories: programmer-friendly and user-friendly. With SourceForge, there's a great interface to download binary versions of software buy and a lot of people, without even knowing what open source is (the definition by OSI is not the easiest to comprehend, and I dislike the 'free software' movement). But say, GitHub and Bitbucket are focused on the source code and are terrible to use as websites, whereas some apps on SourceForge that have little in the way of the website have been quite successful with technical users. Why are these important? Because developers want a nice frontend by which they can easily see license information and bits of your code, and end-users should never be expected to compile from source. Linux users are used to it, but only due to the platform's unfortunate fragmentation (don't dare say anything, I'm a Linux user myself and I don't shy away from its issues).

That's why at least having a web frontend, I believe, is very important. And please! Not an Apache Server FTP-like joke of 'frontend'!

Hosting code yourself? Fair enough. Be warned the bandwidth costs may increase, especially because developers regularly fork straight from the subversion repository.

Also, be warned that Trac is not the friendliest of solutions... from what I've seen, it just doesn't get people reporting bugs. It's not as bad as Bugzilla, which, it has been said was intended by Mozilla to be terribly hard to use so only developers would use it. But it's pretty high up there in terms of user unfriendliness. That's why LibreOffice built an end-user frontend to it, because it's just awful. But back on to alternative solutions (which, by the way, allow you to import tickets), The Bug Genie (has been rewritten and is stable since v3, ignore the naysayers) and its nice looks make it the closest OS alternative to FogBugz. The sheer simplicity of Roundup Tracker is also nice. Redmine is a bit too hardcore and I have to say nay to that, even though I'm a hardcore Rubyist. As for the wiki, keep it, though I think it needs to somehow be more... visible. Depends on the community of course and I don't know enough about the RE command line or mapping or CubeScript to contribute. I'm probably one of those rare cases that never got into Sauerbraten and in effect came straight to RE - though I first tried Cube 2 long before RE (2008 or so). Still haven't gotten into it. :P

So, enough evangelising (and unnecessary rambling). You seem pretty dead-set on it... only further advice is, please don't migrate from this forum. I think many other people (say, from SuperTuxKart which is probably more popular than RE) have found RE through this forum and it's worth keeping it here.

TL;DR: Trac is lame, self-hosting is difficult (not to mention installing and maintaining all these things is annoying, massive hassle when a dependency decides to update) and finally, stay in this forum please

[Dratz-_C]

quin,
Thence mac (and linux?) are afforded standalone desura and thus standalone downloads without autoupdating, unlike in the windows desura integrated client which supports it. http://www.desura.com/groups/desura-pub ... ac-support The downloads would be faster than sourceforge and other distribution methods would remain working. This approach sounds like the best of both practical methodologies.
Evropi,
I do not know enough about all of those alternatives to trac from a developer-centric perspective to comment on their advantages and disadvantages but it is reassuring to know they exist. I have never been responsible for a server. I have used a server and installed applications and have watched and helped a professional work on one when it was down. Accordingly, I again cannot produce a useful opinion. However, I do agree about staying on this forum which I have grown to love.
Cheers

[qreeves]

I'm quite happy with FGD forums, the fragmentation away from our own internal architecture ended up not being such a big deal because our community was able to flourish with others. I think we've all been rather happy here.