[Savannah-hackers] about savannah reinstallation management

[Mathieu Roy]

Hi,

The service we worked hard over several years to maintain in a decent
state is now down since more than a week and we, savannah-hackers, do
not have even a clue about what is going on.

People in Boston told us they we're about to reinstall the
system. Fine. They in fact changed completely the hardware, a good
thing, but that takes more time.
After that, we we're supposed to have access to the server we
maintained over several year on a pure volunteering activity, to
reactivate the services. But we hadn't new with that, we just seen
some announcements posted by the FSF about the services going to be
restablished. 

Decisions are made without even a note to us.

What do you expect from us? How do you consider us?

I think I can tell that, over years, we established a correct
reputation for savannah of reliability. A reputation of reliability
that all the GNU services do not have, I would dare to say. This
reputation is going to be completely destroyed and we do not even know
why, either we know what to do with it.

You have trouble with the hardware? Ok, we can wait. But for the
rest, we already enough worked with the server to have a clue about
what to do with it. We are sure not against an audit of the code. But
I'm surprised to read that you want to audit the code of the savannah
interfaces and to see that you never posted a message to
savannah-dev, asking for information to people that are already
familiar with the code. You also created a mail address
address@hidden without telling us, just like if you were
interested in avoiding having us to know what is going on (apart from
people that are unhappy with the downtime, there is no traffic on
savannah-hackers, these days).

It looks like a matter of trust. Do you distrust us to maintain that
server?

Do you accuse us for the compromise? I would like to remind that the
kernel we were running when we got compromised, around 2nd November,
had the ptrace bug: 

       - I asked the 27th March 2003 for an update of the kernel to
       sysadmin (I do not want to change a kernel over ssh)
   <http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2003-03/msg00896.html>

       - I reasked the 13th June 2003 for an update of the kernel
       to sysadmin. Paul said he was about to do it, but apparently he
       had no time, because it did not happened.
   <http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2003-06/msg00536.html>
 




Usual disclaimer:

I speak for myself, and only myself. But I would be surprised to hear
some other savannah-hacker saying he is very happy with how things are
going. Things would be better if we *just* had a clue about what is
actually going on. Things would be best if we were not excluded on
this reinstallation. 

Or maybe I'm just dreaming and everything is fine. I hope I'm just
dreaming and that everybody understand the situation
otherwise. Please, tell me I'm wrong.



-- 
Mathieu Roy

  +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | General Homepage:           http://yeupou.coleumes.org/             |
  | Computing Homepage:         http://alberich.coleumes.org/           |
  | Not a native english speaker:                                       |
  |     http://stock.coleumes.org/doc.php?i=/misc-files/flawed-english  |
  +---------------------------------------------------------------------+