Savannah Administration - News: Savannah status report

Savannah status report

Item posted by Loïc Dachary <loic> on Thu 12 Apr 2001 11:03:43 PM UTC.

This status report will give you an idea of the work
done  on Savannah, the  projects and  the problems  we face.
All in all Savannah already helps a lot and promises to help
more in the future.

The biggest news  is that it was decided  by RMS and
GNU  volunteers that Savannah  will open  its gates  to Free
Software  packages  that  do  not  yet  belong  to  the  GNU
project.  A  specific domain  name  will  be  used for  this
purpose  : freesoftware.fsf.org.  My  hope is  that it  will
happen before the end of the month. There is still some work
to do to  complete the Savannah setup. Before  it's done, we
won't advertise Savannah to the public.

On  the  mailman front  things  are not  progressing
much. But there  is hope: Guillaume will be  able to spend a
full week (5 days) on it  next week.  I hope he will be able
to  finish  it by  next  week.  For  those who  don't  know,
Guillaume  had  school  examinations  last week  and  is  on
holidays this week.

Jaime  is taking  care for  viewcvs +  commit_prep &
log_accum and will  be able to solve all  the issues related
to it shortly  (Am I putting too much  pressure on you Jaime
?-). Anyway, it's quite  important that Jaime is commited to
make this work.

Jeff is  still keeping an eye on  CVS related issues
but has no more time to devote to it really. He took care of
subversions.gnu.org  from which Savannah  originally spawned
during many months. Savannah would certainly not be there if
he did not take much  of his time answering my questions and
providing help when it all started.

GNATS  is  a  blocking  point. Nobody  has  time  to
develop  a decent  web  interface for  GNATS  and this  will
postpone the first release of Savannah for an unknown amount
of  time.  All the  other problems  can be  dealt with  in a
reasonable  amount  of  time.  I  fear we  have  to  take  a
difficult decision here.

I'm  very  busy finding  a  replacement machine  for
Savannah (dual  800 PIII,  90Gb disk, 1Gb  RAM). I  sent the
money, the  proposal is  on the way,  Brad took care  of the
hosting and  the installation is  scheduled May 15.   I will
spend a  week in Boston  to do the installation.   This will
not be  a migration, just a hardware  replacement (you may
look at the Machine: tasks  in the Savannah project for more
details).

I added  a few utilities in the  Savannah admin page
that  most  of you  probably  never  saw.   It helps  a  lot
filtering submissions,  although I'm pretty sad  to see that
16  of  them  are  still pending.  Accepting  Free  Software
projects in  general will solve  this, I guess.   Other than
this Savannah is  working with very few problems  and it's a
real delight to see all this system administration work done
by  scripts. To  be honest  a French  guy is  having endless
troubles to  create his  account. This is  so weird  that we
decided  to meet  this Saturday  to sort  it out.   And have
lunch near the canal.  And a beer maybe.

The migration of the  www.gnu.org web site on CVS is
apparently well  accepted by web-masters.  Although CVS helps
in some ways  it also has drawbacks such  as the handling of
symbolic links. This one  was fixed but some people complain
about publishing documents generated by scripts, such as the
output of TeX-info documentations.  I find it very convenient
to be able  to work on the result of a  checkout on my local
machine and  then simply commit instead of  running emacs on
gnudist  with  a  shaky  connection. Jerome  Dominguez  will
provide tools  based on CVS  to help the translation  of the
pages. He used this custom tools even before www.gnu.org was
migrated to CVS but now he is able to share them.

Olivier Lejade proposed to  find someone to design a
custom look  for Savannah instead  of the current  one.  For
those who don't know, Olivier  is the CEO of the company who
did the  current Savannah logo. He did  not promise anything
but we may have a nice surprise someday ;-)

In conclusion  I'd say that  I love to  see Savannah
working  and  expanding.  The  methodology used  to  develop
Savannah  is very  different  from the  methodology used  to
develop SourceForge. Savannah is  run by volunteers and will
expand  if and  when  volunteers use  it  and contribute  to
it. SourceForge mostly depends on the employees of VA Linux.
A  key element  to  be  able to  cooperatively  work on  the
development of Savannah is that a skilled volunteer does not
need two  weeks to get  involved. When Jaime arrived  he was
able to  read internal  documentation, check the  task lists
for ongoing efforts status, get the necessary permissions to
do his work within two days.

I  commited  myself   to  help  and  coordinate  the
volunteers the best  I could. Tell all your  friends to send
an  email   when  they  have  some  spare   energy  to  help
Savannah. They will be warmly welcome ;-)

--
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  loic@dachary.org
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      loic@senga.org
75019    Paris         Tel: 33 1 42 45 09 16        loic@gnu.org
        GPG Public Key: http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt