[Savannah-hackers] Update on Savannah

[James E. Blair]

The FSF admins (of which there are only two on staff) have a backlog of
tasks related to Savannah that we have not been working through as quickly
as we had hoped we would.  We've been out of the office on holiday around
the new year, and we've had a number of urgent tasks (one assigned
directly by RMS) that we have had to work on in addition to Savannah.

But this is what we have been working on recently:

* We have had multiple hard drive failures (not on Savannah), that
  have required immediate (and considerable) attention.
* A new local root exploit prompted us to drop everything and compile
  kernels for all of the machines that we run, including Savannah.
* We've been working on the webcvs repositories.  We have them up and
  running now, so people can work on them.  We have been struggling to
  get the GNU web server to update the content from those
  repositories.  We're very close to having hourly updates working
  properly again.  (We still plan to get sync-on-commit working again
  after we get through more of the Savannah tasks.)
* We fixed the "uidxxxxx instead of username in CVS history" bug.  This
  involved changes and testing to cvs and the cvs-chroot code.
* We checked out the gnu-content and non-gnu content trees as
  requested by savannah-hackers so that they can update site content
  through CVS.

These are the things we still have to work on:

* We have identified a number of potential problems with the back-end
  Perl scripts.  These still need to be corrected before we can:

     * Rework back-end scripts that create projects so that the
       repositories are created correctly in the new chroot environment.

* Address security and authentication concerns about the file upload area,
  and then re-enable that.

* Make viewcvs work with the webcvs repositories.

* We must address the "cvs-locks" bug.

* We need the help from savannah-hackers in creating a new web interface
  to the administrative files in CVSROOT.


We very much need the help of savannah-hackers to finish the work of
creating a more secure and robust Savannah system.  We're working as hard
as we can, but we can't possibly run Savannah by ourselves.  We want to
work with savannah-hackers to improve the system.  Please keep in touch
with us regularly so that we can help each other.  Bradley has proposed
weekly IRC meetings, and we hope that we can make those happen.

-Jim