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

[Jaime E . Villate]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 04:38:21PM -0700, Free Software Foundation wrote:
> 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

Yes, that has been very clear to me (and I'm sure Loic and Guillaume
too). With the SourceForge code we used, those changes were very difficult to
make (it is very messy and non-portable). We proposed to rewrite the code
using phpgroupware to make it easier to separate the two sites, but several
problems led us to abandon the phpgroupware implementation. Meanwhile, Mathie
Roy (yeupou) and Laurent Julliard (ljulliar) joined the savannah-hackers and
started working very actively in improving the old PHP code. I appologize for
not having informed them well enough about the current issue savannah.gnu.org
vs. freesoftware.fsf.org

As part of my research at CERN, I started recently implementing the Savannah
software there to manage the software projects at CERN. I've taken this
opportunity to make the development of Savannah's software one of my major
research projects, rather than just a volunteer task; I've also hired Mathieu
full time during the summer to help me with it. He just started last week, so
we have not reported any results yet, but we've already made a lot of progress
in turning Savannah's code more portable, as you can see from the ChangeLog. I
expect that in less than a week we will finally be able to separate
savannah.gnu.org and freesoftware.fsf.org and make them look like two separate
sites (with mutual links).

When we start making the transition we will keep you posted to work out the
best solution to solve the current confusion.

Cheers,
Jaime