Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?

[john smith]

I am not at all against discussing my submission, which is linked upthread,
but for now I want to concentrate on one a single aspect of it, and it's
not the code. In my view, and by the admission of the reviewer,
https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370 is an example of a submission being
held up and not accepted based solely on personal and subjective opinions
of the reviewer. With my inquiry here I am only trying to figure out
whether Savannah project demands, allows, or abides by
filtering/censoring/rejecting projects based solely on subjective opinions
of its members (Savannah hackers). If yes, what is the goal for such
practice? If no, does the Savannah project expressly forbid such practice
internally?

Questions you've asked would be more suitable in a discussion pertaining to
the development of my project, and if you are interested in joining the
project and contributing ideas and code, please email the project leader:
address@hidden

This mailing list is, ostensibly, for discussing general questions of
interest to all Savannah users, just like the questions I stated above, and
I feel that discussing the nitty-gritty of my code here would be completely
off-topic. If, however, you see something in the submitted code that
contradicts the assertions and claims I've made so far, then by all means,
please point it out.

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 5:32 AM, "André Z. D. A." <address@hidden>
wrote:

> I am just someone giving some questions and a few words or ideas from what
> I have discovered in the last few minutes, by reading your message and
> examining your code a bit.
>
> What your project does?
>
> Why would I want to install it?
>
> How do I install it? What will happen in my system when I install it?
>
> Does it depend on specific programs or packages? Which? Why?
>
> Does it depend on any libraries?
>
> Does it depend on specific versions of some software?
>
> Where is the documentation for it?
>
> What each script do?
>
> What each script assume?
>
> What are the limitations of each script?
>
> What would I possibly want to add to your project? I have some nice
> scripts too.
>
>
>
>
> Em 28-02-2017 22:57, john smith escreveu:
>
>> Dear Savannah hackers,
>>
>> My name is Ivan Zaigralin, and my email is address@hidden I am
>> using this gmail
>> account because messages sent to this list from my own domain seem to
>> disappear into
>> a black hole.
>>
>> I am currently in the process of submitting a project to the non-GNU part
>> of Savannah. I seem
>> to have hit an unexpected barrier: unexpected to me, but may be that's
>> just
>> because my
>> expectations were out of line with reality, so I hope you can help me to
>> resolve this issue.
>>
>> What I submitted was ~ 120 KiB of bash code + licensing information. To my
>> surprise, my
>> submission is not being accepted, and the reasons stated I will simply
>> quote:
>>
>> "These are person-specific scripts"
>>
>> "It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful."
>>
>> "Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours."
>>
>> "All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. They
>> are just not written with
>> such use in mind."
>>
>> "I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g.
>> simplistic package. We have to
>> use our judgement."
>>
>> I want to draw your attention specifically to the fact that the reviewer
>> is
>> using nothing but his
>> subjective judgment in order to decide whether my submission is "generally
>> useful". I also want
>> to make it absolutely clear, I have no complaints about this particular
>> reviewer, and nothing in
>> this post should be interpreted as a criticism of that person or any of
>> his
>> actions so far.
>>
>> The reason I find this surprising is this: FSF endorses Savannah as a
>> "hosting service":
>>
>> "There are many services that will host your project's source code"
>>
>> "Savannah is a community project, providing code hosting for your free
>> software project"
>>
>> This endorsement is explicit in claiming that Savannah will host *my*
>> project, which I
>> understand as me preserving the creative control over the code I submit.
>>
>> To contrast, the GNU project does and should make subjective calls as to
>> what constitutes
>> useful GNU software, just as the KDE project members make subjective calls
>> as to what
>> constitutes contributions useful to KDE. This makes sense because these
>> are
>> software
>> projects, and when I submit code to them from the outside, it is implied
>> that they have the
>> creative control (or at least a greater share of it), and will make
>> subjective calls in line with their
>> unique and subjective vision of what their project should be and how it
>> should get there. Most
>> such projects also have very detailed descriptions of their subjective
>> visions; for example, KDE
>> is defined as "advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications
>> for communication,
>> work, education and entertainment and a platform to easily build new
>> applications upon", and
>> much much much more, which really narrows down the scope of the project,
>> and makes it
>> perfectly clear that only the code implementing that vision will be
>> accepted. There is also
>> absolutely no surprise when senior members of the KDE team, who share the
>> creative control
>> over their project, reject code based on their personal and subjective
>> notions of quality and/or
>> usability.
>>
>> So I was taken aback, to be frank, when I was told by the reviewer that my
>> project is not
>> accepted based on nothing but personal and subjective criteria having to
>> do
>> with general
>> usefulness. After a lengthy inquiry, I still cannot locate any official
>> Savannah description of any
>> usefulness tests applied to submissions. I was fully expecting objective
>> criteria (besides
>> licensing), such minimal & maximal size in bytes, but I cannot find any
>> listed anywhere.
>> Indeed, I cannot even find any official subjective criteria, which would
>> make sense if Savannah
>> was in fact a software project. So it looks to me like my submission is
>> being held up based on
>> a personal subjective usefulness test which was applied to my project
>> only,
>> effectively singling
>> it out. So with the information I have now, the only way to interpret what
>> is happening is that
>> Savannah is de facto a software project, whereas Savannah hackers assume a
>> share of creative control right from the start, from the moment of
>> submission.
>>
>> Just like any community project, Savannah is fully entitled to make the
>> rules, but as an FSF
>> member I see an issue with endorsing Savannah as a "hosting service",
>> unless it actually is a
>> hosting service in a manner I described above, which brings me to my
>> questions for the
>> Savannah community:
>>
>> Does or does not the Savannah project demand, allow, or abide by
>> filtering/censoring/rejecting
>> projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah
>> hackers)? If yes, what
>> is the goal for such practice? If no, does the Savannah project expressly
>> forbid such practices
>> internally?
>>
>> Thanks for your time :)
>>
>> References:
>>
>> FSF endorsement: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah
>> My Savannah submission: https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370
>>
>>
>