I'd like to know a bit more about sourceforge before I register. I want to just host a couple of small Open Source Linux apps which I've written and i want to know whether it could be used for hosting such apps.

1. Is it free?
2. What are the features/limitations?
3. How easy is it to use it?
4. Will I be forced to learn new things like CVS and so on even if I am a single user?
5. What are the kind of projects that can be hosted? Can I host scripts like Python and so on?

I couldn't find enough documentation on SF on this, but I would be glad to know if anybody can help me here.

Hmm, I am the webmaster for a Sourceforge project so I can give you a little. I don't do much on the dev side though so haven't used CVS or anything like that.

1. Yes, it is free. You get 100MB space for your project and 5MB for your user. These can be increased if you email support and ask really really nicely

2. You get MySQL DBs (not sure how many off the top of my head) but you can't specify users for them. You get three users for your account, one has read-only permission, one has read-write and one has admin. It's enough to work with and that's all you're really after here. You get shell access which in my mind is a big handy feature but the web space certainly has it's share of limitations. Due to them having so many projects and so much traffic, things like suexec would bog the servers down too much so their security is fun to try and work around. The web server can't write to the web space and because they use load-balancing and PHP stores sessions in /tmp you can't use normal sessions out of the box.

Now all those things are workaround-able and if you'd like I can walk you through how as I won my fight with their servers not long ago myself but I'm not going to waste space posting it all here.

3. With a bit of knowledge behind you, pretty easy.

4. Only if you want to, you can just as easily only upload a tarball of your program.

5. Do you mean does the web server have mod_python installed or can you host software you wrote in Python? The former, I don't know for sure but I'm pretty sure no, the latter, of course if it's approved.

1. Yes, definitely. I'm a registered user. In fact, I just registered now.
2. I'm guessing I'll be to join or help other projects now. Have'nt done anything useful just yet.
3. If you can use linux and program on top of that, chances are you'll find it easy
4.It does'nt *force* you to use cvs, but it is highly recommended. CVS may be a little difficult, but it is after all, what makes this all possible.
5.You can host in any program language you like. If your project is interesting, you may even get a few recruits. You might even attract slackers, like me.

Yes, I'll try it out. It looks like a good option indeed.

Yeah, about python. It was source code, not to run off the server. So I guess there should be no problem with that.

I did a little GUI Hardware Info tool in Linux with Python and PyQT. Also have a couple of other projects in mind!

It's immensely confusing.

I've created a new project and it's been approved.

Now I don't know where to start. The docs are confusing as well. Can anybody tell me just how to get started? Upload files to my project site and so on?

BTW, I'm creating a new Open Source forum software and it's in PHP 5 and SQLite (thought I'd be different and not use MySQL )

It's an interesting concept and it's taking shape beautifully.

I've already written about 2000 lines of code and that's just the user registration, login, the forum index, forum config file and so on.

It's all in a half-finished state, but I am not sure how I can test it online because I don't think sourceforge.net supports PHP 5 and SQLite so I cannot put a forum there.

If anybody has any ideas, suggestions and offers for help, I'd be glad to hear from you. Just send me a message by e-mail

(EDIT: hope this is not considered advertising. All I am asking for is help for an open-source project )

Well finally I uploaded the project into my sourceforge web directory and it didn't work since it requires PHP 5. Hmm...