[Savannah-hackers] freesoftware.fsf.org and non-GNU packages on savannah

[Free Software Foundation]

>  Are you actually saying that the official position is that they
> shouldn't be there?

The rule for savannah was, and always has been, that we would quietly,
non-officially, accept non-GNU packages on savannah.gnu.org.  Before
making the whole thing official, we were waiting for the sites
"savannah.gnu.org" and "freesoftware.fsf.org" to be separated a bit more
clearly.  Once that was completed, our plan was to announce it publicly
and really start to invite non-GNU packages in a major way.

That URL issue hasn't been handled yet, so we can't announce it yet.  In
fact, right now, if you go to a non-GNU package's page with:

      http://freesoftware.fsf.org/projects/PACKAGE

the URL bar in the browser actually rewrites to:

      http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/PACKAGE


Thus, the freesofware.fsf.org name is barely ever seen, and savannah is
the default.


What has happened here is that the savannah hackers never got the time to
implement the features in the savannah codebase that was needed to make
this change happen (that's understandable; they're all busy volunteers).
Meanwhile, word of mouth spread far about savannah, and now there are
indeed tons of non-GNU packages on savannah, and people are likely RELYING
on the URL being "savannah.gnu.org".


We have to figure out a way to solve this problem.  Our original thinking
was that we would split freesoftware.fsf.org and savannah.gnu.org as a way
to show our non-GNU vs. GNU hosting so that users wouldn't confuse them.


It looks like because of circumstances that strategy for dividing them up
won't work.  We have to find a new solution, or figure out to recover the
old solution (which seems extremely difficult now).


--
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director
Free Software Foundation     |  Phone: +1-617-542-5942
59 Temple Place, Suite 330   |  Fax:   +1-617-542-2652
Boston, MA 02111-1307  USA   |  Web:   http://www.gnu.org

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