[savannah-help-public] Issues with the current hosting request protocol

[John Preston]

I would like to raise an issue with the current hosting request
protocol. To illustrate, I recently wanted to register a new project at
savannah.nongnu.org, but the hosting request process assumes that I have
already produced code for my project and that I have a tarball of it. I
added a comment stating that my project was only in the planning stages
and has no code yet, which is because I wanted to begin development only
when I had a hosted VCS somewhere (in this case at Savannah), which I
believe to be good practice. My hosting request was refused, because I
was required to provide a tarball containing a COPYING with my license
and at least one source file with an appropriate license header. I was
told that this was to prevent licensing conflicts later on.

I will agree that having a COPYING established at the beginning of a
project is a good idea, and I also agree with establishing the license
clearly at request time. However, I disagree with having to have code
before being able to issue a new project. In my opinion this promotes
bad practice (development outside of a VCS), will result in an initial
amount of code that may not be publicly visible and/or version
controlled, and does not suitably address the issue of preventing
licensing conflicts in the future; just because I have one short code
file at the beginning of development with a suitable license header that
does not imply that this practice will continue. At present the current
application procedure seems to alienate new projects such as my own.

I move for a change in the application procedure allowing for the
registration of projects with no existing code.

Thank you for your patience. Thoughts?