Re: Subprojects in Savannah

[Ian Kelling]

Luis Falcon <falcon@gnuhealth.org> writes:

> Hello, Alfred
>
> Thank you for your mail and for your comments.
>
> On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 04:33:03 -0500
> "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>>    Sorry, I've waited too long. I have started the migration o the GNU
>>    Health mercurial repository to OSDN. It's a pity, but it seems
>> like the requests over these years for the modernization of Savannah
>> have not been taken into consideration. 
>> 
>> They have, but like all volunteer projects -- someone has to do the
>> work.  Would you like to help with that?  Nothing will happen, nor
>> will it help Savannah or the GNU project if everyone does nothing.  
>> 
>
> Please, let's stop using the volunteer job as an excuse. Many of us
> volunteer in different projects, not just technical. Volunteering
> implies commitment.
>
> Don't take this personal, is not directed to anyone in particular. What
> I mean is that sysadmin or management o Savannah can not be something
> that we do in our spare time or if we feel like doing it.

This is completely wrong. First, you aren't someone who does sysadmin or
management of Savannah, so saying "we" and "our spare time" is wrong and
incorrectly includes you. Savannah IS something that is done in
volunteer's spare time when they feel like doing it. That is the case
for most of GNU, and it's a perfectly valid reason for some task not
getting done.

FSF employees like me are a small minority and we maintain some services
for GNU. For Savannah, we only maintain low level things like the
physical server, but the Savannah volunteers do the rest. We happen to
be working on hosting new forge software that GNU can use. Once that
launches, we will welcome and recruit GNU volunteers to run an instance
for GNU. You can read about that here
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration.

>
>
> And yes, I have proposed different models and Libre platforms for
> Savannah. In my opinion, spending time patching an obsolete system is
> not the right approach. 
>
> I could have created the repositories myself in 5 minutes, as I did in
> OSDN, if I had access to that resource. We need to be in full control
> of our resources.
>
> I don't want to get back to the old discussion on who is in charge of
> GNU resources, and who has access to the servers. 
>
>> How is OSDN ranked on the GNU Ethical Repository list?  .
>
> You mean https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html ?
>
> OSDN has not been evaluated by GNU, and I explained my criteria to
> choose it on the news.

Registering an OSDN account requires solving google recaptcha, which
means running nonfree software in your browser. There is a project to
reverse engineer recaptcha and solve it with free software, but it's not
updated much, and doesn't work reliably.
https://git.nickolas360.com/nickolas360/librecaptcha. Because of this
OSDN would get an F on the gnu ethical repository criteria. Also, on the
list of repositories for gnu health, the field showing the url is blank
unless you run nonfree javascript in your browser. That would also cause
it fail.

>
> I find very worrisome that GNU approves platforms which deny access to
> citizens from some countries, like our friends from Cuba. Denying
> access to Libre social projects based on the country of residence or
> origin is an flagrant attack to human rights. 


You've completely misread the ethical repository criteria. It says that
allowing access to all countries is a requirement for any approval at
all in the hosting criteria
https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html#C2,.


>
>> You say that it only hosts free software licesed projects, but that
>> isn't what they say -- the say open source licenses, this is not the
>> same.
>
> I agree, I don't like the term "Open Source", and I also try to avoid
> using the term "Free". I like to use the term "Libre". There might be
> OSI approved licenses that we might agree or disagree. We use GPL v3+.
> Some colleagues might like it and some other might use BSD for their
> projects. That is their choice and we should respect it the same way we
> want them to respect ours.
>
>> 
>> I suggest that GNU health moves back to savannah, it isn't too late to
>> do this.  
>
> GNU Health is still in Savannah. Mailing lists, bugs, tasks, news, file
> releases are in place and operational.
>
>> What needs to be done for this to happen?
>
> This is the deal... If by tomorrow we have the repositories in GNU, I
> will set the newly created repositories at OSDN as read-only
> Here is the list of repositories:
> https://osdn.net/projects/gnu-health/scm/
>
> This deadline is not capricious. Reverting this decision supposes a big
> effort for me and for the community. Because of the history of the
> project and the relation with GNU, I am willing to give it one more try,
> but we can not halt the project development. At the end of the day, it
> takes two to tango.
>
> We need the freedom to manage our computing resources at GNU.org.
> It's ironic, but we're failing on the very concept that we want the
> community to follow, the freedom to manage their computing resources.

"our computing resources" are the resources of GNU, not just gnu
health. And gnu has that freedom, you have to collaborate and work
within gnu to use them.

>
> For instance, we should, as project administrators, have shell access to
> create and manage the needed resources, or an alternative that won't
> require us having to ask the GNU sysadmins to do it for us. Requesting
> help from sysadmins should be a last resort, in case of emergency. 
> The management of our projects should be done by ourselves.

OSDN provides a shell with some limited commands, but that is no
different than savannah where you get a html based shell with a limited
set of commands. To have control in the sense of software freedom you
would need to need to have control over what exact software is installed
and run and how its configured. GNU has that for the GNU servers. Some
GNU packages have their own virtual machines on FSF servers, GNU health
might be able to get one. I see GNU health seems to have their own
server hosting it's home page, mercurial could be hosted there
presumably. Just because the software OSDN is running allows creation of
multiple mercurial repositories under one project does not mean it gives
"freedom to manage computing resources" in the sense of software
freedom. In fact, you have less, its just proprietary software running
on their server that happens to have an extra feature.

>
>> 
>>    I even asked in the meantime to manually create some additional
>>    repositories, but I never got an answer.
>> 
>> Did you remind them?  It might be that they simply missed it.
>
> How many times?

Well, at a bare minimum, one, which you didn't do. You didn't get a
reply to one email and gave up. Generally, for something like this, I
might suggest twice over a week and then if you got no reply, email some
related people directly to ask for help getting a reply to the original
question.

Bob was still a bit unclear on the answer to, "Does Mercurial handle
subdirectories in the repository?"  Savannah admins are not experts at
mercurial.


For example, currenctly there is

health
├── .hg

Would it be good to create a new repo like this:

health
├── .hg
└── thalamus
    └── .hg

And the other repos you mentioned. If those subdirectories would work
fine with mercurial, I'm pretty sure the savannah sysadmins can create
them within a day or so and they will be functional, but they won't show
up in the Savannah UI under the repository section until someone makes a
patch to Savannah for that. In the meantime you could write a note about
that somewhere people are likely to see. This still leaves question of
renaming the "health" repository to "his", but savannah admins can
answer that question.


> I asked to sysadmin to create the repos, then I was re-directed to
> Savannah hackers, start from zero again, to reach this dead-end, where
> I had no other choice than to host the repositories outside GNU.org

You could have easily avoided the
re-direction. https://savannah.gnu.org/ says near the top where to ask
questions. You could also refer to
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-structure.html.

It's normal in life for people to overlook email, it doesn't mean it's a
dead-end, it means you need to email again.

>
> I feel awkward asking for things over and over again. I don't want to
> bother anyone.
>> 
>>    Here is the news:
>>    https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=9874
>> 
>> You are using the word ecosystem -- something that lacks any kind of
>> ethical or moral judgment -- to describe GNU Health, it is a word best
>> to avoid in describing free software and GNU projects.  See
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Ecosystem .
>
> I strongly disagree, and I kindly ask to please remove this wrong,
> pejorative, and reductionist interpretation of the term ecosystem from
> GNU.org site. It is completely out of place.
>
> I often explain the importance of collaboration and cooperation among
> diverse actors, and what I call "collective freedom" as the main
> driving force for evolution in our societies. In this context, GNU
> Health is a digital health ecosystem.
>
> Ironically, many in the Libre software community are influenced by
> the anthropocentric, selfish and competitive vision of this world. The
> vision of the human being superior to other species and the
> competition-driven, capitalist society have made this planet a trash
> bin, a daily Treblinka to many species and an ever increasing social
> gap and exclusion. 

This is the wrong list for getting that changed, as stated on the page
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Ecosystem,
suggestions can be sent to <webmasters@gnu.org>. And please don't
complain about 


-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org