Re: [Savannah-users] what are the usefulness criteria for submitted code?

[john smith]

> I am the administrator of one of the Savannah packages,
> and not a Savannah administrator.

Thanks for making this clear.

> http://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php

This list I am aware of, and to my best knowledge I am in full compliance,
which is as much as confirmed by the reviewer, who never brought up any of
these *objective* rejection criteria.

> http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html

I have made it abundantly clear to the reviewer that I want to maintain
complete creative control over my project, and have no desire to adjoin it
to GNU.

> The servers that run the Savannah hosting are run by
> volunteers and paid for by donations. It's impossible
> for Savannah to host every project...

I'll cut you off right here if I may. What we have here is an apparent
rejection of a *single* ~120 KiB project. It is ludicrous to claim that
accepting my project, or any other project similar to mine would imply that
Savannah has to accept *every* project. I am not saying you are claiming
it, I am just saying, I hope you don't.

> ... so I can see why the Savannah hackers would want
> to apply some subjective criteria to help focus the
> limited resources.

And I don't see that at all. I am convinced that whatever abuse exists
(does any exists, by the way? and how much of it?), it can be dealt with by
applying *objective* rejection criteria. This is, of course, my personal
opinion, but if any Savannah project member wanted to refute it, they could
easily do so by providing the evidence of attempted abuse, so that we can
judge its scope by ourselves.

I very much doubt the Savannah team has the problem you are alluding to. I
would not be at all surprised if the amount of evidence they have for
hosting-crippling abuse via tiny and functional shell code is similar to
that for the  evidence of illegal immigrant voters throwing the last US
presidential elections. Who in the world would abuse Savannah in this way,
when it takes 6 minutes (I checked) on GitLab, from reading the
instructions on creating an account to having a working public git repo?
This is not an endorsement of GitLab or any other slimy hosting services,
just an observation.

> Your options at this point are either to wait
> for another Savannah hacker to agree with
> you and overrule ineiev,

This would move things in the right direction, in my personal opinion, but
I have to be frank: what I have seen thus far will force me to keep
inquiring about a policy statement from a Savannah team, since that's the
only thing I am after right now. This current inquiry is not about getting
my project approved. The approval forum linked upthread is a more proper
place for the approval discussion.

> or to make improvements to your code to make
> it more general-purpose and applicable to a
> wider audience.

This would not help. My reviewer was abundantly clear that the code changes
would have to be made with the goal of convincing *him* *personally* it
meets his subjective "general usefulness" criteria, which is pretty much
the opposite of what you are saying. And even if the entire Savannah team
comes to his side, the force of my argument will not diminish in the
slightest, since the subjective opinion is a subjective opinion even in the
case when it's a project-wide consensus.

You are right about one thing: all I can do right now is to patiently wait
until an actual Savannah administrator addresses my concerns.