Re: [Savannah-users] new project submissions disabled

[Steve White]

Karl,

This brings up a more general problem.

Although in some departments Savannah and the GNU effort generally
seem to be functioning well, I have myself noticed unfortunate lag in
others.  Furthermore, lately I've noticed several projects that appear
to have been abandoned many years ago.

I think I speak for many of us working on free software projects, that
we would gladly contribute somehow, if only we knew what was lacking.

And that's the problem.

One sees lots of projects, but to see which are being actively
maintained, one must research them individually.  There is a
"contributors wanted" list, but that list is a big mix ( including
10-year-old requests for non-GNU developers).

The question is, what is really needed by Savannah, by GNU?
What is the general state of GNU now?  Where are we strong, where are we weak?

And who the heck is GNU anyway?  There's a list
    http://www.gnu.org/people
to which one is added only by knowing the right people to pester.  We
don't even know who we are.

How about:

* Make sure that list of contributors is current, and contains at
least the admins of each GNU project (unless they request to be
excluded)

* Some regular health check of projects:  I don't know quite how to do
it, but one thought would be, to mail project admins once in a while,
asking them to just click a link to indicate they still administer the
project.

* A regular report of how the effort is progressing, posted to a
read-only mailing list.
Maybe biannual or quarterly would be enough.
Is there a mailing list for such a thing?  Of the hundreds of mailing lists at
    https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo
very few appear to be about GNU in general.  There's
    gnu-misc-discuss and News
essentially unsused, and  completely unused (respectively -- Geez, the
lists could use some clean-up too!),
and the one we use for release notices seems inappropriate.
    info-gnu
The most active list I'm on is
   gnu-prog-discuss
but this one is too busy for this purpose and apparently geared toward
programmers.

2¢


On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 1:27 AM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Very regrettably, due to a lack of volunteers, new non-GNU project
> submissions are no longer accepted on Savannah, as of
> 9 November 2011.  If active volunteers come forward, Savannah
> will be re-opened.
>
> See https://savannah.gnu.org/register/ for more information.
>