Re: [Savannah-register-public] [task #13433] Submission of clone of jdorn json-editor

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello Dan,

Thank you for your explanation.

On Dec 27, 2014, at 14:10, Dan Wasson <address@hidden> wrote:

> At first I was not going to submit this project since it did seem as though 
> Savannah was only for serious long-term projects, but I decided to submit 
> this one-off project anyway after looking at the Full List of projects and 
> finding many that were unmaintained and even completely empty.
> 

Agreed, and that's not ideal - a situation we're slowly working on improving.

> Please be advised, that by not supporting one-off's or personal files based 
> on a user's account (like GitHub's gists), those seeking Free solutions are 
> left without recourse (and I realize I am not in a position to help with your 
> effort at this time).

I agree with your observations.
GNU Savannah is based on old code-base (similar to old source-forge), and 
doesn't support many modern-day features that could be considered almost 
'standard' in other hosting services: forks, per-user projects (private, 
one-off, etc.), gists.
Even the concept of project evaluation and approval could be seen as a hinder 
to helping people use free-software hosting solutions for free-software 
projects.

I believe the reasons are mainly two:
first and foremost - the requirement is that only projects which are truly 
free-software - and so all the features that allow users to create projects on 
their own can't be enabled at the moment.
Second, Savannah is maintained by very few volunteers and has limited resources 
- and so development of new features and hosting many small projects is a 
challenge.
As a side note, a policy of Savannah is that no code is ever removed - to 
ensure no one (even the author of the project) can't delete a free-software - 
and this does not lend itself to favoring small,private,one-off projects.

I hope that at least some modern features will be implemented in GNU Savannah 
eventually, and hopefully will support more users and more diverse scenarios.

Regards,
 - Assaf