Software

Recently I mentioned that I hate releasing software. It's true, and I've decided that the first part of fixing it is to tackle the presentation of software to the world.

My current scheme of darcs.complete.org for repositories plus bare directories on my gopher (yes, that gopher) site leaves a lot to be desired. There is no bug tracker, there are few screenshots, there is no consistency. It is also not easy to empower others to work on them directly.

At the same time, I am the sole or primary contributor to most of them. These are not huge kernel-sized projects. These are smaller, bite-size projects. So I don't want or need a lot of overhead. I've been thinking about my options.

• I could just use sourceforge.net. I poked around there today, and all the advertising there is a real eyesore. Plus I figure that if anyone is getting paid for all my hard work, why should it be some random people that no longer write free software? On the other hand, it would be an easy way for my projects to gain visibility. Or I could use alioth, and give up both the advertisements and the larger visibility. But I don't like giving up control over my site's appearance, or behing beholden to others for backups, uptime, etc.


• I could use trac. It's nice, and is the only option that supports darcs, and has a very cool wiki integrated into everything (even parsing out keywords from changelogs). On the other hand, downloads are -- at best -- attachments to wiki pages. There is no download manager. And you have to set up a separate trac instance for each project. That is a non-starter for me. If I can't see all my bug reports at one place, the bug tracker will be too annoying to use.


• I could use gforge or savane. These are the sourceforge forks. Neither seems to be as resource-hungry as I expected, and debs are available for both. I could just install them locally and use them for my projects, though that seems like overkill. Plus, like SourceForge and Alioth, they have a crappy web-only bug tracker. I'd rather use something like RT that works by email. (Though RT is too resource-intensive to run on my server). However, web-only is better than nothing so I could hold my nose and use it.


• I could write my own. But I'd rather not, if there's already something workable out there.

Is anyone else thinking about this? What are your thoughts?

I use more than one computer, and quite a bit. I use three regularly, and two or three more on occasion.

But this seems to be a surprise to many programs.

I want to carry certain things with me from machine to machine, access them from anywhere, and have changes propogate across.

Things such as:

• Bookmarks


• newsrc files (to mark which Usenet articles are read)


• mail (solved with my OfflineIMAP program)


• A small set of files


• Contacts


• Calendar/scheduler (appointments)

Now, MacOS X seems to do some of this with their for-pay mac.com service. But I wonder why so few other apps do this out of the box?

The newsrc question is a particularly difficult one to crack, it seems. There are various schemes for synchronizing bookmarks, but none seem to work reliably.

Sigh.

I've written a bunch of software. I like coding, I like debugging. I like getting e-mail from people that have used my software and are happy.

I don't like actually having to make a release.

To do a good and proper release of a program, I'd be doing approximately these tasks:

• Upload to Debian


• Push to my darcs repo


• Upload a tar.gz to my server


• Update a webpage with the latest tar.gz


• Announce the release to freshmeat


• Announce the release to a mailing list


• Update/post screenshots, if things have changed

So I have two wishes. First, I want a tool that maintains a website with software listings. Each program should have its own page, with a description, links to mailing lists, download links, links to the darcs repo, screenshots, etc. It should be simple but I'm too lazy to write it.

Secondly, there should be a tool that will do all of the above tasks (except the screenshots) for me. It should infer the name of the project and the version from the data in my working directory. It should be able to automate this while process without me having to lift a finger.

Sadly, no such thing seems to exist.

And, to date, I've been too lazy to write one. Does anyone know of such a thing?