It is a package of Sourceforge for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. That means, it's a file (or set of files) that can be installed by a package manager, resulting in an automatic installation of the Sourceforge software on a Debian system. A few questions can be asked to the user as part of the process for the local settings, and the result is that with a Debian system and a simple "apt-get install sourceforge" command, you get a fully-functional Sourceforge server running in a matter of minutes with no hassle.

Well, in theory.

In practice, you only get a mostly-functional Sourceforge server running in a matter of minutes with no hassle.

Well, first, a statement: the package is based on the last officially released version of the Sourceforge code, labeled 2.5. We have modified little of it except for bugfixes and necessary changes. We are also working on the 2.6 version, based on a snapshot of the upstream CVS. There has never been any official release of Sourceforge 2.6, but the snapshot was tagged "2.6.1pre4", and we just call it "2.6" for short.

What works: you can create your projects, your user, manage them, use the bug-tracker, the patch manager, the monitoring of those things, the documentation manager, the surveys, etc. The LDAP backend works, which gives us the CVS and shell accounts, as well as email forwarding. DNS is done, as well as virtual hosting for the project homepages. The mailing-lists work (using the LDAP backend too). File releases also works (including the Quick Release System).

What works not (yet): the stats, the peer rating system.

Well, we use some of the features provided by Debian. The dependencies system allows us to be able to rely on the appropriate pieces of software to be installed. The Debian policy allows us to depend on a system where we know where the files are and how we can modify them. Some Debian-specific tools (e.g. Debconf) allow us to ask questions to a user on his first installation, in a friendly way. Building on top of these, a few scripts have been written to turn the original SF2.5.tar.gz tarball into a policy-compliant, running Sourceforge. These scripts take care of configuring Apache, Bind and PostgreSQL (plus others), they create the database, they upgrade it when needed, etc. And they clean up after us when the user decides to remove Sourceforge.