Re: [Savannah-hackers] What's up?

[Nic]

Tom Lord said:
> 1) I've been unable to get the latest release of arch uploaded to the
>    web site.  The request went in 20-Aug and the autoresponder said
>    "most responses occur in 24-48 hours, not counting weekends and
>    holidays".  (Followup messages have not been answered.)
> 
> 2) After the security problems on ftp.gnu.org, there was talk of 
>    setting up an alternative means of doing unattended uploads.
>    That was originally advertised as being planned for the first week
>    of August.
> 
> 3) The protest page on the front page appears to be broken -- 
>    the image fails to load after a long wait.
> 
> 4) I can not edit my www.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch pages very easily
>    because this item:
> 
>       http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=2340
> 
>    is still unresolved.
> 
> 
> 5) The mailing lists are incredibly sluggish lately.

rms followed up:
> Can you tell me what's happening with the work on these problems?
> Whan can we do to help you work on them better?

I'm a beginner savannah-hacker, but I'll try and answer your
questions (apologies if someone else already did).



> (Don't bother with #5--that's not your area, and I know that the problem
> is the viruses.)

No.1, No.2 and No.4 are not down to the savannah-hackers either. bkuhn
and the gnu admins need to provide the new facility for uploading to
the webservers and to the ftp site. I believe they've been held up by
problems finding sigs for all the downloads.

I think the protest page has been taken down now. Maybe Tom hit it at
the wrong time.


I think some of Tom's complaints may be a little out of date. No.4 is
now happening more frequently.

As to what we could do to fix the problem: IMHO savannah-hackers are
woefully understaffed. In part this is a problem of the system: it's
big and quite unwieldy. It's taking me quite a long time (given my
meagre spare time) to get to the point where I feel confident about
doing stuff.

In part it's a problem of advertisment: hackers who use savannah
don't necessarily know that it's volunteer run and could do with a
hand. Loic probably doesn't want to advertise in a very direct way
becuase a key component of being a savannah hacker is trust.

Lastly, it's a problem of tools: the bug and task assignments are done
over the web and that's the only way to track them, that is they are
not interruptive (there are mails but they are so slow right now they
can't really be considered interruptive either!) 

It's not possible to setup more than one view of the bug and task
lists for regular viewing (eg: I can't quickly get a list of bugs
assigned to me and a list of unassigned, opened bugs).

I am going to alleiviate this tool problem a little bit by adding an
RSS feed for projects. For most projects it will be generated daily
and then cached but I think for the savannah project live generations
would be good. It would be a nice way of keeping on top of problems.

The organisation of this stuff is key I think because the easier it
is to deal with problems the more savannah-hackers we'll be able to
get involved (more people like me for example, with little spare time
to give to the project).


We're going to need to do that anyway. I don't believe that savannah
can continue to scale on single boxes. We're going to have to start
using multiple servers. That will really swamp the existing team.

I have some thoughts on that I'll be airing over the next month.


Nic