Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] creating lists

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 06:17:54PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Both:
> 
> I see, thanks.  Would it be reasonable to have one call the other, so we
> don't have to maintain the same logic in two places?  I could take a
> look ...

This sounds a bit overkill to factor out 5 lines of code, but feel
free to have a go :)


> To continue ... what I really need your help with is how to work with
> the web site, e.g., add some text to the mailing list admin page or undo
> the justification in css (assuming you agree with the changes).  I've
> looked and looked at the wiki but have not found anything I can follow.
> Sorry.

The frontend is part of Savane - we run with this branch:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/p/savane-cleanup


Changing the themes means editing the CSS files (what you look for is
in base.css), I'll do that.


Changing the custom texts means:

- there's a custom text to change (not on every page)

- the custom texts are stored at
  http://web.cvs.sv.gnu.org/viewvc/administration/content/?root=administration
  and they have an automatic on-commit replication to our Savane
  setup.


Since Savane is not specific to Savannah, we do not edit the Savane
code directly, but instead we try to configure. That's why we don't
have a way to edit the Savannah webpages as directly and easily as
www.gnu.org.


I don't know if this can really be documented. At some point Savannah
Hackers need to learn about Savane. Editing custom texts sure could be
done more easily though.


> (I rather suspect this is a stumbling block for other people who
> would like to help with savannah, too.  Did we not get *anyone*
> active out of those couple of dozen volunteers from the FSF call?)

There are more important issues with this volunteers call but we'll
discuss this another time :)

>From Savane's INSTALL file:
<<<<<
If you want to give a quick try at the web interface:

        cd tests/minimal_configs/
        make install

Then point your browser at http://localhost:50080/
That's all!
>>>>>

You also have a pre-installed QEMU image ready to run.

If that's too much complicated for the volunteers, they probably can't
help with Savane. But that was about working on Savane, not Savannah
itself.


I don't know how things can really be improved. I think Savannah does
require some prerequisites (Debian, VServer, Savane) before one can
fully contribute to it. I recently simplified the setup to remove lots
of historical quirks, but I wouldn't remove those prerequisites. As
far as I'm concerned I had to learn about those along the way (there
was no documentation on the fresh Savannah setup back in 2004), so I
don't have a personal experience to remind me how it could be done
more easily, short of writing tons and tons of documentation that
probably nobody would have the patience to read (let alone
write). Suggestions? :)

-- 
Sylvain