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SourceForge Removes Shell Access, Becomes Terrible Mess

SourceForge is a terrible mess now. The old and new documentation is all mixed up — if new documentation is available at all, which is the exception, then the old documentation is easier to find. When I tried to figure out why SSH access to shell.sourceforge.net wasn’t working anymore, I was finding only the old documentation [1] (which I followed exactly, unsuccessfully, of course), not any new documentation.

As it turns out, SourceForge decided to just remove interactive shell access [2]. The only place I found this mentioned was in the linked support request! How is that documentation?

SourceForge really need to remove outdated documentation! It’s better to have no documentation than to have outdated, incorrect, misleading documentation. I wasted a day trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Now I realized I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was just correctly following SourceForge’s incorrect documentation.

I still have not even figured out how to do anything using the new “replacement” services for the shell. We have to rethink the way we update the news on the web site, and right now I don’t even know how to effectively edit the website. Editing it using emacs in the remote shell was very easy and direct; having to rsync the files back and forth seems like a huge hassle.

We need to look at alternatives and consider taking DrJava away from SourceForge and somewhere else, or at least figure out an easy way to update the news and edit the website. I’d welcome any suggestions.

I’m sorry for the rant, but I’m very irritated that I wasted a day on something as silly as trying to log in using SSH, figuring I must be doing wrong.

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