CalDAV Store now on Sourceforge
Just before I went to the Sydney Moodle Conference I set up a sourceforge project for the Really Simple CalDAV Store. This is good because it disassociates the project from Catalyst to some degree as well as providing me with space for forums, bug tracker and so forth.
It's interesting to look at Sourceforge from this viewpoint though, because I wonder how lively sourceforge really is. According to their home page they have "Registered Projects: 132,439 Registered Users: 1,421,324", but after a few days activity with my RSCDS project I have managed to surpass 132,319 of those projects to be at number 120!
Is it really that easy to be more active than those 132,000 projects? It would seem so. Penny, Martyn and Nigel have also set up a project last week for the Mahara ePortfolio which they are working on, and at this point there is almost nothing there at all. Even so, that project is ranked at number 18,000 or so, suggesting that there are around 110,000 projects on there which are basically dead.
Still, it seems that it might be something to do with their weighting algorithm. I took a look at the statistics for Project #121 (Sahi at the moment) and it seems to have a noticeably greater number of web hits, downloads, and so forth, so I can only conclude that my secret weapon has been my mirroring of my Git repository into the Sourceforge CVS and Subversion repositories.
Well, to be strictly correct, I guess only the mirroring to the Subversion repository counts, since there are no statistics available for the CVS repositories it seems unlikely that they enter the mix in this way. So with that in mind I feel I should level the playing field and publish my mirroring scripts.
So here they are, for mirroring from Git into a CVS repository use cvs-mirror-git-init first and then use cvs-mirror-git whenever you want the mirror to be brought up to date. Hopefully the 'usage' information is sufficient to describe the care and feeding of the CVS mirroring scripts.
For mirroring from Git into a Subversion repository use svn-mirror-git to bring the repository up to date. Before using it you need to do something like:
mkdir newproject
svn add newproject
cd newproject
svn propset svn:ignore .git .
svn commit
to create yourself a new empty directory for the project to exist in.
Possible reasons for your ranking...
There's several reasons that you currently have a good ranking, and some of the reasons apply to why the Mahara project also seems to have a reasonably high ranking.
Firstly, the activity percentile is calculated by an arcane formula that is largely affected by your activity over the last seven days. Both projects are pretty new, and so have had some "default" activity at the very least, such as the two default forums created. RSCDS also has a website on sourceforge that is getting a double deal - hits on a sf hosted virtualhost website and hits on a sf.net logo. Mahara does not have this.
But the biggest booster for rscds right now is that there's been a large hunk of "replay" commits to CVS over the last couple of days. Now, while the sourceforge documentation on statistics says that both CVS and SVN stats are not taken into account, I have noticed with GeSHi, and it seems to apply to all other projects, that version control activity relates to increased project ranking. So rscds has a large activity percentile based on your initial large commit. I'd say in seven days or so the ranking will fall quite significantly, to somewhere between 90-95%.
Note that the scale is logarithmic, so the absolute project ranking will be somewhere in the thousands.
And yes, I'm aware that this is at odds with what I said at work the other day about CVS not counting towards project statistics - I'll put that down to a moment of madness on my part :)
Oh, and finally this post isn't a rebuttal of the fact that sourceforge has a lot of dead projects - it certainly does :)
-- Nigel
Some clarification
Yes, I had figured that the subversion commits added significantly. I've finally caught those up today, so no more of that :-)
On the other hand I don't think CVS counts. I did my CVS mirror much faster but to essentially no effect. Maybe.
What definitely does count is activity, so publishing news, releasing files, updating docs, opening and closing bugs, and posting on the forums counts noticeably in addition to the basic web statistics.
After posting my entry I managed to jump even further to #76, and again today to #72. Clearly unsustainable, but my surprise relates more to how achievable even such a short term ranking is. I will continue to be surprised if I can remain in the top 100 for more than a few days.
Of course I *do* now have a new point release ready, so maybe that will be reasonable.
I guess we shall have to see what happens :-)