Re: Savannah and GNU

[Alfred M\. Szmidt]

   The first problem that I saw on GNU is the decentralization of the
   GNU projects. I don't think that decentralization is bad in every
   case, but sometimes there is no logic on the decentralization of
   GNU development.

   I think that all GNU projects could be hosted on Savannah. There
   are packages that are hosted on sourceforge, packages that are
   hosted on personal webpages (GSC, DMD), or packages that are hosted
   nowhere (GNU.FREE).

I agree completely, I don't know about GNU.FREE, but GSC and DMD are
only hosted on my personal webspace simply because Savannah doesn't
support GNU Arch, and secondly, because DMD wasn't a GNU project until
only recently.

   And the second problem that I saw on GNU is because GNU projects
   aren't help each other. In some cases, there are two or more
   projects doing the same thing, projects that use external resourses
   when we have GNU projects that provides that resources (ex.:
   Savannah uses cvs, when we have GNU Arch, CSSC and RCS, all of them
   doing the same thing).

It is simple to put this down in writting, but it is hard to make it
practical sometimes.  Michael Flickinger was working on adding support
for GNU Arch to Savannah, but he seems swamped with other stuff right
now so that work is stalled for now.

Also, saying that GNU Arch, CSSC, RCS and CVS do the same thing is
simply not true.  They serve different goals, CSSC is used by people
who already have data stored in a format suitable for CSSC.  RSC is
also quite useful at time when it is to much trouble setting up an
archive for GNU Arch.  CVS isn't even a GNU project so no problem
there.

Also, the resources that Savannah provide are sometimes completely
unsuitable, like the patch/bug/feature trackers.  So it would be nice
if GNATS could for example be used, but someone needs to do that work,
Micheal added it to his todo list, but knowing how long my todo list
is, I don't expect him to do it any time soon. :-)