[Savannah-dev] Savannah development at CERN (+please introduce version tagging)

[Derek FEICHTINGER]

Hi,

at  CERN we have been using GNU Savannah with quite some success and I notice 
from emails to our site that also other institutes visiting our site are 
getting very interested in the software.

Since the structure here at CERN demanded some special solutions we were 
forced to adapt Savannah to our circumstances. As mentioned on previous 
occasions we would like to donate them back (or find together some other 
solutions) but since the current Savannah CVS repository utilizes no 
versioning scheme (no CVS tags) this is rather difficult. Without tags it is 
also difficult to provide patches because you always have to refer to a 
running target. Because we could not afford the time to continually update to 
the current GNU Savannah CVS and constantly reimplement our extensions, we 
were forced to branch off.
(Note: The last sync with GNU we did on January 17th 2003)

People from the other institutes are now starting to ask for our version. I 
think it would be sad to split the development effort off the Savannah 
community in that way, so we would like to make another effort in commiting 
our stuff back. 

Our current extensions are:

- PAM based user authentication (which fits in with the AFS authentication 
system)
- simpler user management system: Users can sign up for a project and get for 
that project a pending status. The project manager is then notified and can 
decide to make them active users by picking the names from list boxes.
- possibility for project admins to do user management through submitting a 
batch file (this is very useful for signing up lots of people to a project. 
The current Savannah interface requires the admin to type all the names).
- The CVS address is now a per project property, because many of our hosted
  projects already had an own CVS with own implementations of access 
  restrictions. We did not want to force our customers to use our central 
repository.
- Mailing lists in our version needed to work with majordomo instead of
  GNU mailman (we would have liked to use Mailman but the CERN mailing lists 
are based on majordomo).
- Some enhancements to the FAQ system, but the solution still not fully 
satisfactory (Still, each project now can store the FAQ in its download area,
and specify the order in which the items are listed.)
- we fixed many minor bugs which caused problems when the installation
  was not located in the root directory of the webserver.

On the CERN Savannah server there are now 57 projects, and we receive a lot of 
feature requests. In order to implement some features we will need to add 
fields to the data base tables and this will branch our version even further 
off the GNU CVS head version. Before we do this we would really like to make 
another effort of deciding together with you, the GNU Savannah community, 
whether there is a possibility in doing some development together.

Regards,
Frederik Orellana and Derek Feichtinger

-- 
Dr. Derek Feichtinger                   Tel:   +41 22 767 26 98
LCG/SPI Group                           email: address@hidden
CERN                                    http://people.web.psi.ch/feichtinger
CH-1211 Genève 23