Re: port some changes from master to branch-2.5

[Joel E. Denny]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, tys lefering wrote:

> > Perhaps requiring FSF approval and completely free hosting is so
> > restrictive that we have only one option: wait for Savannah to offer
> > something.
> savannah is very busy, assuming that may take years to come.

Agreed.

> also came across ideatorrent, also GNU GPL php source
> used by sourceforge, olpc, ubuntu, maybe something for bison
> http://www.ideatorrent.org/

That's also been suggested to me on another mailing list.

> it would be very nice if bison can have such
> a site for users to vote and submit ideas.

Interestingly, the most popular idea on ubuntu's ideatorrent right now is 
how the developers should actually pay attention to the ideas posted on 
ideatorrent:

  http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/
  http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23040/

I'm afraid this will also happen to Bison, and I think that would be worse 
for user morale than not having an ideatorrent at all.

For now, what we really want is to ask very specific multiple-choice 
questions, and then we want summary statistics automatically computed from 
all the answers given.  I'd like to see if ideatorrent's permissions and 
voting can achieve this.  Unfortunately, the ideatorrent demo has been 
broken both times I've tried it, so I'm not sure yet what its capabilities 
are.

Then again, if users see that we're blocking their ability to add ideas, 
that might be a blow to user morale as well.  I think we would need to 
carefully explain that ideas should be directed to the mailing lists, 
which we follow on a regular basis.  The ideatorrent would be just for 
occasional surveys we create.

Finally, there's again the question of hosting.  We could start a 
sourceforge project, but I guess we'd need FSF approval.  (I guess I could 
start one anyway just to experiment with ideatorrent's capabilities, but I 
don't have time at the moment.  I want to spend time on rolling 2.4.2, and 
the ideatorrent demo may be fixed eventually anyway.)

> cannot imagine it is not possible to find
> a free server which is oke with the fsf.

I would've thought so too.