Re: [DotGNU]SourceForge drifting

[David Sugar]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, tony stanco wrote:

>
> > David Sugar <address@hidden>
>
> >I think Savannah, and what is now happening there, is the codebase for
> >the future, not Sourceforge or whatever happens to the pre-fork
> >codebase.  Being able to setup a Savannah anywhere will be very useful.
> > It is a mistake in my view to have "one" monster site.  There are
> >plenty of projects organized around a small community or a campus, and
> >having a Savannah one can role out to manage them locally would be very
> >nice.
>
> A monster site is usually going to be a problem, because it can try to
> monopolize or is a single point of failure issue. I talked to Larry Augustin
> about a month ago about placing SourceForge at the universities that I deal
> with for FreeSoftware development, because they have huge pipes, can act as
> local centers and they have professors and students, who we should invite
> into the community. I thought it would have been better to do that with
> Savannah, but talking to Richard and Loic during the summer, I thought
> Savannah was only for GNU projects for the foreseeable future.

The Savannah "code base" used to run Savannah can be packaged and deployed
elsewhere, or, at least, soon should be able to.  I know Loic had to go
thru a lot of work de-fixed urling the thing in all it's code.  And I
recall even at the LSM he mentioned that they were able to make it into a
deb package, although it still required customization to get running then.
With a little more work, it should be possible to get Savannah's codebase
to the point it is fairly easy to distribute and configure.

 >
> >At most, what would be nice is a meta-aggregation site, such as thru a
> >search/directory engine for "published" projects on Savannah-like sites.
>
> Exactly. Distributed Intelligence with a good searchable directory linkage
> is a good overall model.
>
> > Not all projects need to be published widely; sometimes someone might
> >create a small site and set of projects for personal work, for example.
> > Another example might be a company or organization which has some
> >custom projects and some public projects.  Being able to move projects
> >between such sites easily could be nice also.
>
> Yes.
>
> >I think being able to deploy Savannah in a distributed manner, and
> >having a global directory/search engine site that can sit on top of it
> >would meet everyone's needs very well.  I also think much of the work
> >that has gone into Savannah will eventually make this become reality.
>
> There is a very good chance I can get some grant money from the NSF for this
> with George Washington University and Cyberspace Policy Institute as
> sponsors. I think $500,000 is possible.
>
> We would need documentation and specs for the application. There is a
> December 6 deadline for some IT projects. I would have to check to see if
> this can be fit in there.
>
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