Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Question about Savane API

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello Troye,

On 09/25/2014 10:16 PM, socketpro wrote:
> Savane's API seems to make a system group (like adduser/addgroup(8) )
> with the same name as each project. This means, a 'savane' project
> will create a 'savane' system group on the system. If that is how it
> is, then each system can only have say, a few thousand projects, or
> 40,000 projects. Any hackers out there can confirm this?

Yes, each project in the GNU Savannah website (and internal database) gets its 
own unix group.

There are about ~3600 registered project/groups on GNU Savannah,
and on some Savannah servers there are ~3600 unix groups ( e.g. on "vcs", see 
http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/SavannahArchitecture/  , checked with "getent passwd | wc 
-l" ).

> So to have say 250,000 thousand projects under one "org", you will
> need a Savane install with a couple of brother sites? This is so
> weird it made me chuckle. It took me a time to realize this after
> reading the source code.

As GNU Savannah currently hosts less than 4000 projects (accumulated over ~14 
years), 250K projects seems far away to be an immediate concern.
Remember that the hosting model for GNU Savannah is different than other code hosting 
services: users can't "just create" their own projects - each project must be 
approved.
For better or for worse, this approach (and perhaps other issues) does reduce 
the number of projects hosted here.


But more to the point - are you concerned about GroupID/UserID limits ?
While I'm not an expert about this matter, I do believe most modern GNU/Linux 
machines the UID/GID variables are 32-bit, raising the theoretical limit above 
~60000 (the expected limit when using only 16-bit).

Regards,
 - Assaf