[Savannah-hackers] Re: about savannah-hackers

[Loic Dachary]

Masayuki Hatta writes:

 > Hmm...so why don't you use SourceForge 2.5 (or later, possibly CVS

 Because it was started when sf-2.5 was not available.

 > snapshot)?  I really don't get it why you say "Upgrading to 2.5 is
 > also out of question".  Is just replacing it with newer version (with

 Mainly because it has too many changes and pages have been modified.
SourceForge is not a proper software and upgrading is made impossible
by the fact that you have to modify far too many things and the fact
that the developpers do not care a bit about upgrading. They do their
own upgrading by hand and don't write any documentation.

 > your modifications for Savannah) not enough?  Anywise SF 2.5 has (at
 > least a kind of) I18N stuff and even seems to have the theme faculty

 SF-2.5 has a very limited i18n (no templates for instance). Sure it's
good to be able to translate menu entries but that's about 5% you need
to translate the whole web site.

 > which possibly we can use for Savannah.  I think if you even think
 > about "a complete rewrite" of Savannah, it would be much easier to
 > adapt achievements from the SourceForge crew.  I guess they got more

 Believe me I spent an enormous amount of time trying to do this, back
to SourceForge-1.0.4. The SF is *not* meant to be upgradable. A complete
rewrite would be less painful. Of course if you think of re-implementing
all features SF has, it's out of question. But when you think about it
SF has few original features. What it brings to us is : "everything 
automated to the max" and a consistent interface for various things. The
bug tracking thing for instance should really be GNATS, the forum thing
should be an existing php forum software, not a re-implementation, the
skills and job section should be a job board software. All these exists
and a complete rewrite would mean to re-implement the core features
(authentication, interface) and bind to other software for other features.

 > resources(I mean users, developers, money, etc.) than us so why don't
 > we make use of 'em! ;-) If 2.5 is not stable enough, we should help
 > them to debug it, don't we?  Or do you want to make the Savannah code
 > fork from the original?  If so I strongly object to it since in most
 > cases forking is just a waste of man power (Eg. Emacs/XEmacs whirl).

 I went as far as to actually go to see them (I'm in France) and try
to convince them that we should all develop that cooperatively. They have
no interest into this because it slows down things as far as they are
concerned. I spent entire weeks trying to avoid the fork and was *very*
sad when I had to give up the idea to work with the SF team. Check 
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/09/0853201.shtml for more background
on this.

   Take care,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
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