TJforge

Overview
TJforge is a system similar to SourceForge for collaborative development of projects. It is primarily for the use of techlab projects which involve multiple people (such as Iodine).

History
TJforge was originally a project started by Eric Harmon in 2005, and was going to use GForge as it's backend system. Later he was joined by Andrew Deason in the project, to try and make sense of GForge and it's lack of good documentation (and several other confusing things, such as having at least three different configuration files, which some scripts didn't even use). In the end, Deason ended up severely modifying several parts of the project to try and get it to work in our environment (especially the subversion plugin, which seemed only half-done). To add to the frustration of the GForge application, the "server" it was being tested on was actually a slow and flaky workstation, which had habits of not POSTing occaisionally.

Later, the Trac project was discovered, and it was seen as much better alternative to GForge. Deason tried to install it on the remote access server, and it was quick and relatively painless. Very few hacks were done this time, and pretty much all changes made to the code were submitted to the Trac project as possible patches or plugins. In particular, the code changes to add a form-based login system is now available here at TracHacks as a normal plugin.

Trivia

 * On the old forge testing machine, there was a script run from inittab so that a fortune was always displayed on tty7. The fortune refreshed after a certain amount of time, depending on how long the particular fortune was. Deason considers this to be TJforge's best feature at the time.