Savannah Administration - News: Savannah future

Savannah future

Item posted by Loïc Dachary <loic> on Fri 05 Oct 2001 12:26:26 PM UTC.

In the past months various discussions about the future of
Savannah designed a solution to the problems we currently have:

- centralized
- code impossible to maintain/upgrade
- no internationalization
- no packaging

The core of the problem comes from the unmaintainable state of
the SourceForge code. Re-writing the whole thing is a lot of work, too
much if you ask me ;-) However, there is phpGroupWare
(phpgroupware.org). It implements most of the functionalities we need
and use on Savannah. In addition it provides an xmlrpc interface that
will be a relief for people who think that HTML based interaction
sucks.

rms once told me : "why is there enough manpower to re-write
Savannah when we lack the manpower to do simpler things such as adding
a bug tracking facility ?". Apparently nobody is willing to invest
time on the current code base. When we implemented the first instance
of Savannah at the beginning of the year the goal was simple: reduce the
workload of cvs-hackers@gnu.org to nothing by allowing project
maintainers to manage the membership themselves. In that respect it is
a success: in the past 6 month noone had to manually add/remove
accounts for CVS access purpose, nobody had to wait for days for an
overloaded cvs-hackers to spend the necessary 5 minutes to handle the
request.

Although no official announcement was made about Savannah, the
ambitions slowly grew and people are now expecting it to be a fully
functional development hosting facility. In addition, numerous
development hosting facilities were started and an increasing number
of people, companies, universities and governments were willing to
have their own. I think we now have a plausible working plan satisfy
everyone and the necessary software complete an implementation and
install it on Savannah by the end of the year. It can be done by a few
(4) motivated individuals, it can become truly general purpose if all
people I've been talking to actually contribute to it, it can become a
killer application if a large number of contributors come on board.

When thinking about this plan I searched for solutions that
require a minimal work. Nobody I know has enough energy to undertake a
major implementation for a single component, i.e. more than six month
full time. Each task can be implemented within a few days, assuming
someone has the underlying knowledge (learning xmlrpc may take a while
;-).

The first bits of this project are available at:

http://france.fsfeurope.org/debian/
deb http://france.fsfeurope.org/debian/ ./
deb-src http://france.fsfeurope.org/debian/ ./
http://coopx.eu.org/
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/savannah/

IRC channels where related things are discussed:

#phpgroupware
#debian-sf

I'll be using savannah-hackers@gnu.org as the primary mailing list,
cc'ing mails when appropriate when discussions occur elsewhere.


--
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  loic@dachary.org