Re: [ft-devel] [savannah-help-public] https source for the git repo

[Bob Proulx]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> [I'm including `savannah-hackers' so that they can give a definite
> answer.]
> 
> > Is there a trusted https source for freetype2.git?
> > 
> > http://www.freetype.org/developer.html only states
> > git://git.sv.nongnu.org/freetype/freetype2.git
> > and http://git.sv.nongnu.org/r/freetype/freetype2.git
> > 
> > trying https://git.sv.nongnu.org/r/freetype/freetype2.git gives an ssl
> > connection error.
> 
> It seems that HTTPS isn't (yet?) available.  I agree that it would be
> a good thing if Savannah could provide this protocol.

We all agree that it would be a good thing.  It will definitely happen
at some point.  But it requires a general OS software upgrade on the
server.  Which is problematic because the system is somewhat broken
preventing us from being able to upgrade it easily.  Just rebooting is
problematic at times let alone kernel upgrades.  This has been a
continuing hot issue of discussion the last couple of years.

I've decided that the way forward is to migrate from the current
unsupportable VMs onto newly created and supportable VMs.  At that
point simple things like OS upgrades will once again be easily done.
That will allow Savannah to roll forward with software upgrades as
they appear.  Immediately that would give us the current set of
capabilities people expect these days such as PFS and https and all of
those types of things.  But moving forward it would allow us to
upgrade to new things that haven't yet been created.  We can just keep
updated at that point.

Blocking this has been the lack of resources at the FSF.  There hadn't
been any of hardware, software, or admin resources.  For example the
recipe to create new VMs had been lost and we couldn't get new ones
created.  The current hardware is overloaded.  There have been
multiple issues.

Of course this problem has gotten high visibility at the FSF the last
two years.  Frankly I think things had to get bad enough in order to
get enough visibility in order to get resources allocated.  It has
only just recently in the last month started to get addressed.  Just
recently the recipe to create new VMs has been restored.  This is now
possible on a secondary server different from their overloaded one.
That is a really good thing and is a breaking news item right now.  We
just got handed a new VM to work with last week.  Yay!

The Savannah team is just now able to start looking at migrating onto
an updated operating system provided by the FSF.  And I hear that more
hardware resources are potentially in the pipeline to address the
overloaded hardware issue.  Things are just now starting to happen.

Bob