Since I've been doing a lot of Rails lately, I've been talking with Rich Kilmer and Ryan Owens about porting RubyForge to Rails. Right now RubyForge runs on a somewhat customized version of GForge. Some noodlings on what a rewrite would involve:

• One cost would be that we would have our own codebase that we'd then have to support. And one benefit is that we'd have our own codebase that we'd then be more able to support :-) The performance would probably be about the same; the current site is pretty snappy.
• We're currently running GForge 4.0.2. It would make sense to upgrade to the newest release (4.5.x or even 4.6 beta) in case anyone other GForge users wanted to follow suit.
• We could probably port to Rails by doing an ActiveRecord model on the existing schema. Doing an AR model first would let us do some of the peripheral parts - like the RSS feeds and the cronjobs and such - without affecting the core code.
• This would take a fair bit of effort, and a lot of the work would be stuff that I'm not good at - user interface, layouts, CSS. Maybe we could make the job simpler by just supporting one theme and then re-adding the other themes as we had time. Ryan could do this stuff better than I, but it'd be in his spare time, which is already in high demand.

A rewrite would mean a lot of work in people's spare time and no one would see any initial benefit. But it make it easier for us to add more AJAXy niftiness and other features as needed. But also.... it would probably be fun. That might tip the balance :-)