FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory… debacle or simply unmaintained?

Today I was looking to the referrers, to see which sites links to mine. I’ve seen once again the entry for Gitarella in the Free Software directory by FSF/UNESCO (is the UNESCO partnership new? I didn’t remember it from some time ago).

Now, if you go looking at the page, you see it in a strange category, in my opinion (Web Authoring?), plus you can see by yourself that something isn’t right.

The URL of the site is correct (and that’s because I sent them an update to tell them of using that URL), but the one to the tarball points actually to the Gitarella browsing Gitarella itself, not the download page; the Source Information link points to nothing, Gitarella is not hosted by SourceForge.net.

Same for the Documentation link, it points to a good deal of nothing, just because they suppose most of the projects are on SourceForge. My contact instead is listed without full name, although I try to use “Diego Pettenò” to refer of myself almost everywhere, when there’s not a requirement for a nick (like in forums, irc and so on), so that I’m easily recognisable.

Now, you’d say, why do you blog about this instead of writing to them to improve the situation? Well, I did write to them, but it seems they didn’t update everything at all :/ Just added a couple more links, updated the version number, and forgot about the broken links and so on.

FSF, you should probably try to cleanup the entries you have there… another example is unieject entry that refers to CVS at SourceForge for source management, too bad I moved from BerliOs to SourceForge when the subversion service was already working, thus I always used Subversion there…

Sigh. Better use FreshMeat, it contains also non-Free software, it’s not sponsored by UNESCO, but as you can report your own projects, it’s usually better updated (although I admit I forgot to update stuff from time to time).