[Savannah-hackers] savannah insanity

[Joel N. Weber II]

I've just wasted ten minutes figuring out how to ``properly'' put
myself in the www group on subversions, since I'd apparently added
myself to /etc/group at one point in the past and that apparently
later magically went away.

Of course, now I'm struggling with trying to figure out how to make
savannah update the group file properly, since that's done in a
non-instananeous fashion.  (It would be really nice if this stuff were
all stored in a database which we had PAM modules that could read the
database, and if we had command line tools that could be used to frob
the database.  Running the ``blanche'' command that MIT Athena uses to
adjust groups and mailing lists is vastly more pleasant for me than
dealing with web interfaces.)

I tried actually running sf_cvs manually, and for whatever reason it
seemed to want to delete a bunch of users (3diff, tower, etc) who
shouldn't be deleted, and there was some other impressive brokenness.
It also seems very poor that it's apparently designed so that if you
don't pipe its output to sh, then those batch updates will just be
ignored and forever forgotten.  Or maybe it's just documented
confusingly.