Plan to move to savannah

[Milan Zamazal]

I plan to move the GNATS' development infrastructure to
savannah.gnu.org.  There is nothing wrong with current Red Hat services,
but I like the idea of a centralized GNU software site.  Also, using
savannah may be a bit more handy (and savannah hackers fearlessly run
GNATS 4 there:-).

I think there is a good time to do the move now, before releasing
GNATS 4 beta -- doing it later would confuse the contingent new users.

The services to be moved are:

1. CVS repository.

2. Bug tracking system.

3. Web pages?

4. Mailing lists.

Of course, no data should be lost during the move, especially all CVS
data, complete bug history, and mailing list archives should be
transfered to the new site.

More details about the particular steps:

1. Moving the CVS archive should be the simplest thing of the all, it
   only concerns a very limited set of people.  Gnatsweb will be removed
   from the contrib directory, since it has now its own archive on
   savannah.  I'm not sure what to do with TkGnats -- Rick, what are
   your plans about it?  Should it simply remain in the CVS as it is?

2. This is a bit more difficult than moving the CVS.  Users must be
   redirected to the new site and the Web pages must be updated
   appropriately.

3. There is already a very simple Web page on www.gnu.org, its most
   important part is the link to the pages at redhat.com.  I don't think
   changing this setup is particularly important, it's mostly up to
   Yngve's decision what he prefers (beware, pages on gnu.org should
   adhere to GNU standards).

4. The most annoying part.  I'd like to make the move as transparent as
   possible, i.e. with automatic resubscription and a temporary
   forwarding on redhat, if possible.  One particular change I'd like to
   make is to rename the gnats-devel mailing list to `gnats' or
   something like that.  The reason is that users are confused where to
   send their user questions.  I think the traffic here is low enough
   not to split the list now, we can do it later if needed.

I'd like to do 1., 2. and 4. at the same time.

So this is the rough plan.  Please tell me if you have any objections,
advice or so.  I don't plan to perform the move tomorrow but I also
don't want to wait with it much.  Unless I receive strong objections
during the following week, I'll start to talk to both savannah hackers
and Red Hat's overseers about technical details of the move.

Milan Zamazal

-- 
Free software is about freedom, not about free beer.  If you care only about
the latter, you'll end up with no freedom and no free beer.