[Savannah-dev] Savannah does *not* compete with SourceForge

[Loic Dachary]

        Hi,

        Savannah has no ambition to grow to the size of
SourceForge. Noone can afford this. We will do everything to favor the
multiplication of independant hosting facilities. This is a major
incentive to write a packageable and upgradable software based on
phpGroupWare that allows anyone to setup and run a development hosting
facility. Two years ago I kind of expected SourceForge would end up
encouraging this but I was apparently wrong. I would have been perfectly
happy to run their software on my own machine to save them the trouble
of setting up and paying huge amounts of hardware and bandwidth. 
Instead they decided not to favor packaging and customization. That's
their choice but it's definitely not the Savannah choice. 

        In order to avoid the proliferation of hosting facilities where
migrating a project from/to another one is a major work (what we are
currently facing with phpGroupWare), we define an export format that
will hopefully be adopted by all existing hosting software. If this
format fails and another has a better chance, we will adopt it. The
main point is not to be proud to invent a project dump format. The
main point is to have one that is reasonable enough to work with.

        This format would not only be used to migrate projects. It
would also be used to mirror projects. Let's say that at some point
phpGroupWare has it's own machine somewhere, running the phpGroupWare
based hosting facility with a galaxy of phpGroupWare applications using
it. Then savannah.gnu.org could rsync the project dumps on a daily basis
and display them in the exact same fashion, except it will be read-only.
Should the user want to submit a support request or something, it will be
redirected to the master site. 

        Should the master site fail permanently for some reason, the
project admins could go to a mirror site and toggle the read-only flag
to read-write position. 

        Note that we are deliberatly not talking of incremental mirroring,
distributed modifications and syncrhonizations. There always is a single
point of modification and multiple read only mirrors. Mirroring does not
need to be smart. An XML dump and rsync will do a good job. Not very 
CPU and disk efficent but simple and bandwidth friendly. 

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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