[Savannah-dev] Re: [Savannah-hackers] what's going on with Savannah?

[Sylvain Beucler]

Alex Lancaster wrote:
> >>>>> "Marcus" == Marcus Hardt  writes:
>
> Marcus> The project was renamed and moved to
> Marcus> http://gna.org/projects/savane
>
> OK, thanks.  That answers my question about the software itself, but
> what about the hosting of all the FSF (and other) software project?

You are (and you are not alone) confusing Savannah|Savane and Savannah. 
gnu.org.

What happened is:

- There was a security compromise at Savannah.gnu.org (not about  
Savannah|Savane). There was new restrictive security policies applied  
at Savannah.gnu.org by the FSF, which made most of the current Savannah  
hackers people leave and set up another service, Gna!. Also, the  
Savannah software maintainance moved from Savannah to Gna! along with  
its maintainers, which all happened to be part of the former Savannah  
hackers team. The latest version of Savane is used at Gna!.

- Savannah.gnu.org is still running and maintained but changes are very  
slow since we are understaffed, and the new Savannah hackers, came  
after the previous staff left, and was not familiar at all with both  
Savannah.gnu.org and the Savannah|Savane code base. The system  
administrators are not very familiar with Savannah|Savane either. There  
is currently no link between Gna! and Savannah.gnu.org, though active  
Savannah hackers are also recent members of the Savane projects, and  
both team keep getting news from the other team via mailing-lists. I  
was told the FSF USA did not want to mention Gna! on Savannah, though I  
keep mentioning it when appropriate at address@hidden I  
agree, things are pretty messy.

- The code running at Savannah.gnu.org is based on an old branch, and  
as soon as we get the time, we will externalize all Savannah.gnu.org- 
specific code so we can include our changes in the Savane code base.  
Moving to GForge was decided by the FSF, though it would be a very long  
task. This decision was discussed, but not real conclusion nor  
justification was reached, so as far as active Savannah hackers are  
concerned, we would prefer upgrading to Savane instead.

So, Savannah.gnu.org (ran by FSF USA) and Gna! (independent though  
'sponsored' by FSF France) are different services maintained  
separately, though communication is not excluded. The Savannah|Savane  
codebase is maintained at Gna!.

If you want to get information on what is going on at Savannah, feel  
free to subscribe or browse the address@hidden archives.
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/
We kept the policy to post all of our discussions (except a few  
security-related posts) to this publicly available mailing-list.

Projects may be hosted wherever they want to, though updating the www. 
gnu.org pages has to be done at Savannah.gnu.org. Currently, I am not  
aware of any existing GNU project moving to Gna!, though a new one may  
do so as soon as they get Subversion support (which we do not plan to  
provide at Savannah.gnu.org, though GNU-arch in the future). Several  
non-GNU projects moved to Gna! or any other website, the others stayed.

In a nutshell, nothing changes for GNU volunteers.

Crystal-clear? :)

--
Sylvain