[Savannah-dev] Re: Savannah development at CERN (+please introduce version tagging)

[Mathieu Roy]

Hi,

CVS and patches:
        
        As said previously, we are open to any suggestions. I did not
        know that the lack of tags was creating such troubles to
        you. We have nothing against tagging frequently the CVS,
        despite the fact that the need was not so obvious to us
        currently. 

        As you seem to be working a lot on the Software, it may even
        be more appropriate to grant you CVS write directly.

        Tell us.



The database:
        
        With Jaime Villate, we reached the conclusion that this
        database must be completely reviewed.
        Some tables and fields are useless, it results on a absolute 
        mess.

        We have to list each time a function call a database
        field/table.
        
        We would like to have a clean database before adding new
        fields, and we know that new fields would be required (propose
        us which one you want).

        I think that we should keep at any cost a common database.

        Usually when a new field is introduced in Savannah, it's in
        the ChangeLog. But it may be not enough. In this case, a clear
        README about the database may be an good idea, like the
        README/Policy I added for CSS files, at the suggestion of
        Stéphane Urbanovski.
        


Mailing-list:

        Obviously, the mailing-list software support in Savannah
        should be modular. That way, it should be able to work with
        both mailman and majordomo.



What do you think?
        





Derek FEICHTINGER <address@hidden> a tapoté :

> Hi,
> 
> at  CERN we have been using GNU Savannah with quite some success and I notice 
> from emails to our site that also other institutes visiting our site are 
> getting very interested in the software.
> 
> Since the structure here at CERN demanded some special solutions we were 
> forced to adapt Savannah to our circumstances. As mentioned on previous 
> occasions we would like to donate them back (or find together some other 
> solutions) but since the current Savannah CVS repository utilizes no 
> versioning scheme (no CVS tags) this is rather difficult. Without tags it is 
> also difficult to provide patches because you always have to refer to a 
> running target. Because we could not afford the time to continually update to 
> the current GNU Savannah CVS and constantly reimplement our extensions, we 
> were forced to branch off.
> (Note: The last sync with GNU we did on January 17th 2003)
> 
> People from the other institutes are now starting to ask for our version. I 
> think it would be sad to split the development effort off the Savannah 
> community in that way, so we would like to make another effort in commiting 
> our stuff back. 
> 
> Our current extensions are:
> 
> - PAM based user authentication (which fits in with the AFS authentication 
> system)
> - simpler user management system: Users can sign up for a project and get for 
> that project a pending status. The project manager is then notified and can 
> decide to make them active users by picking the names from list boxes.
> - possibility for project admins to do user management through submitting a 
> batch file (this is very useful for signing up lots of people to a project. 
> The current Savannah interface requires the admin to type all the names).
> - The CVS address is now a per project property, because many of our hosted
>   projects already had an own CVS with own implementations of access 
>   restrictions. We did not want to force our customers to use our central 
> repository.
> - Mailing lists in our version needed to work with majordomo instead of
>   GNU mailman (we would have liked to use Mailman but the CERN mailing lists 
> are based on majordomo).
> - Some enhancements to the FAQ system, but the solution still not fully 
> satisfactory (Still, each project now can store the FAQ in its download area,
> and specify the order in which the items are listed.)
> - we fixed many minor bugs which caused problems when the installation
>   was not located in the root directory of the webserver.
> 
> On the CERN Savannah server there are now 57 projects, and we receive a lot 
> of 
> feature requests. In order to implement some features we will need to add 
> fields to the data base tables and this will branch our version even further 
> off the GNU CVS head version. Before we do this we would really like to make 
> another effort of deciding together with you, the GNU Savannah community, 
> whether there is a possibility in doing some development together.
> 
> Regards,
> Frederik Orellana and Derek Feichtinger
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Derek Feichtinger                   Tel:   +41 22 767 26 98
> LCG/SPI Group                           email: address@hidden
> CERN                                    http://people.web.psi.ch/feichtinger
> CH-1211 Genève 23
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Savannah-dev mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/savannah-dev

-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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