[Savannah-dev] A new comer and an offer to Savannah

[Laurent Julliard]

All,

My name is Laurent Julliard. I currently work for Xerox where I'm at the
head of a team pushing for the adoption of Free Software methods,
tools and culture in our Xerox Corporate environment (tough but fun
job!). I have been a GNU/Linux and Free Software advocate for many years
and the founder of the first Linux User Group in France back in 1995.

18 months ago I managed to convince the Xerox top management to promote
internal source code sharing in our large corporation (80 000+ people). 
An infrastructure based on SF 2.0 was put in place in Jan 2001 and it 
now accounts more than a 1000 Xerox developers and 140+ projects. Over 
time we have gained a real experience with the SF 2.0 software and we 
have customized it in a number of ways based on what we have learned 
from our users.

It has always been our goal to contribute the enhancements we have made 
to the original SF 2.0 back to the Free Software community. A couple of 
month ago I had a long conversation with Loic Dachary and we came to the 
conclusion that even though the plans are to rewrite Savannah on top of 
phpGroupware, it is a good idea to retrofit some of the Xerox code in 
the current Savannah software.

I see 3 interesting contributions right now that Xerox could provide
Savannah with. But before going any further I'd like to get some 
feebdack and comments of the active Savannah developers:

A - A completely new bug tracking system (BTS).
------------------------------------------
The BTS has been heavily reworked twice based on the Xerox developers
feedback. Bug fields are entirely configurable on a per project basis,
much improved search/sort/report facility.

B - A project data export facility
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Each project has the ability to extract the bug and task data from the
global SF database either in the form of a simple CSV file (that any
spreadsheet or script of your own can read) and by generating a project 
specific sub-database that you can query using the appropriate MySQL 
JDBC/ODBC driver. This feature is very handy to massage your porject 
data and generate all sorts of report and statistics.

C - A 100+ page User Guide
--------------------------
Over time we have written a comprehensive User Guide explaining how to
use the various services and what are the best practices to efficiently
share your code. It is currently written in MS-Word (Aaaarghhh!! Yes I
know, I know... but don't shoot at me yet!) and I think the goal is to
reformat the content in a format we all agree on and make it available
to Savannah users.


My plan is to contribute this source code/documentation and be the
primary contact/maintainer for it. Again I appreciate your comments and
feedback as well as your view on how to proceed to commit the changes if 
you think it makes sense.


Laurent Julliard
CodeX Manager
Xerox