Re: [Savannah-users] new project submissions disabled

[Jan Owoc]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Kaz Kylheku <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:46:58 GMT, address@hidden (Karl Berry) wrote:
>> what's required?
>>
>> Applying the (stringent) Savannah requirements to new submissions:
>> https://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php
>
> These are political requirements. Of course nobody is going to
> volunteer to spend time enforcing a bunch of nontechnical rules that allow
> junk projects to filter through, but reject a good project because
> someone dared to write Linux unprefixed with GNU/.

Each hosting site has its rules. The admins of Savannah have decided
that the project must meet certain requirements. Savannah is geared
toward projects that are free software and run on free software. Other
sites have other requirements.


> You're missing something analogous to the Wikipedia's "noteworthiness"
> standard.

I agree that quality free software is difficult to find among a
plethora of lesser free software. I was looking for a free replacement
for Skype and went through a half dozen candidates before giving up.
We do need some process of promoting good free software.


> A project should be worth hosting.  This means that it should have
> a stated goal or mission statement describing something nontrivial.
(...)
> Example: fails on account of being trivial:
>
>  "A program for the POSIX environment which reads the files
>  named on the command line and copies them to standard output,
>  or else reads standard input if no files are specified."

You are describing the program "cat". I know many feel cat is
unnecessary, but I wouldn't want to use an operating system without
it. If you found 3-4 implementations of "cat", you should approach the
developers and ask that they merge their efforts.


> Secondly, it should be in a reasonable state of completion of its
> stated goals. It should be able to produce something that users
> can download and execute, right from the day the project is
> created.

If I were writing a program, I would probably try to consult others
before writing anything. Setting up a project on Savannah is one way
of getting community input.

> Example: fails on account of incompleteness:
>
>  "An optimizing compiler for COBOL with object extensions."

Do you think that one person could write a working program fitting the
above description without any input? (Ok, one person could, but is
that what you would expect from every project founder?)


The problems you described are likely the same problems encountered by
most hosting sites. For every 1 great project, there are 10 average
projects and 1000 projects that are stuck in the "planning" stage. If
you could come up with a way of moving these 1000 projects to the
"release" stage (other than simply saying it doesn't exist), we'd have
100x the free software we do today.


Jan