Saturday, November 1, 2008

Ohnoh - Ohloh got it all wrong!

Well its been almost 8 months since I first reported the inability of Ohloh to correctly analyze a codebase of a project.. In-fact, Ohloh knew about this and they stated "This affects a lot of projects, and I desperately want to get this fixed, but it will take some time" [1].. So I checked back in 4 months since there was no progress, and got the attention of Jason - the chief geek at Ohloh. But unfortunately "this problem simply doesn't rank as high as driving & monetizing ohloh adoption" [1].. and there were some "workarounds" which got my attention! However, after many trials by Jason and me, we couldn't get a historical repo created for Synapse, probably because "Apache Svn repo is one single GIANT repo" [1].. but then again.. this is an Apache project! where many open source projects that Ohloh tracks, lives and thrives.

I then questioned the reason for Ohloh to use the "--stop-on-copy" option.. to maybe try to fix the "real" problem, where it "really" occurs.. but no reply from Ohloh.. but some other guy got worked up at this point and said "Just waiting for an answer is enough - The Ohloh boys and girls will work on your issue once they have fixed more important things" [1].., which really got me laughing :)! - You've got to read this yourself here [1].. Then finally, having worked with many open source projects, I thought Ohloh code would/could also be open source, and maybe I could help them fix it!.. but after suggesting that maybe I could help, about a month has now passed, but still no replies from Ohloh.. so I have given up now!

Going back to cool Statsvn, we can see that the Apache Synapse project lived from September 2005 - for over three years! While .. Ohnoh!!.. Ohloh thinks its not even an year old and even shows a yellow triangular warning - suggesting that this could "indicate an immature or volatile project".. I am not exactly sure to which that seems to apply now..

[1] Thread of discussion on Ohloh - https://www.ohloh.net/forums/3491/topics/1326
[2] The correct code statistics for Apache Synapse can be found at [http://people.apache.org/~asankha/synapse/statsvn/]