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

[Nic]

Mathieu Roy <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> said:
> 
> > I have been occasionally suggesting "Would you like to help run Savannah"
> > when someone says he would like to help.
> 
> Yes, and that's ok.
> 
> But please, now at this point, send people to sysadmins.
> 
> Currently we have no manpower issue at Savannah. 

That's not true Mathieu. I have monitored the savannah situation
since it's inception. I wouldn't say the savannah hackers are
drowning... but they are struggling.

 
> The previous month, I was not able to maintain as I usually do
> Savannah, that's why we Rudy was a bit exhausted.

So we had one person who was maintaining. What if he had been ill?
hit by a truck? bitten by a dog? eaten by aliens?

 
> I do not think we need someone else right now. We're at least,
> including Nic and Vincent, 4 persons, and that's perfectly enough.
> In the past, we were 3 or 2 and we had lesser useful tools and it's
> was still working fine.
> (I do not mention Loic and Jaime because they have enough work to do
> with EUCD, courses and are not really active on Savannah - which is
> not a problem)

More people helping savannah means less work for all of us and more
and larger loads. It can't be a bad thing.

 
> What we really need know is pretty clear:
> 
>         - A responsive staff of sysadmins to handle the machines that
>         are not savannah.gnu.org
>         I think they surely lack of manpower
>         All the current complains of users are related to that

I agree with that. But maintaining the GNU machines is a much more
delicate job than maintaining savannah. The GNU machines have "real"
walking and talking users that they must serve, as well as projects
like savannah. Trust is therefore extreemly important.

The work currently being undertaken will improve the situation
because it will reduce the ad-hoc nature of uploads and reduce access
to the machines. Less users always means less work.

But they do need more help.


         
>         - Some hardware. One year ago, I noticed that before the end
>         of this year we were probably running out of disk space. To
>         face the situation, I sent a bunch of mails and I moved some
>         rather unused data to a temporary location.
>         Since then, I never received any answer about that and know
>         we're going to run out of disk space soon or later.

I agree with this as well. In the short term an extra disc or two
wouldn't go amiss.

Maybe we can just NFS map some space in?

In the longer term we need to move the savannah code to a more
distributed architecture. Storing sessions on the database and having
some cvs name -> host server mapping would be a start.

I am actively tryoing to work out how we could do that. Hopefully the
RSS project will be a first step.


> So I think that's manpower at savannah is really not a problem
> now. 

It's a terrible risk Mathieu, to run a system with this few
people. If you were taken ill now could Rudy take over? No, he's busy
with his exams. Could I take over? No, I just don't have that kind of
time.


>         I am going to alleiviate this tool problem a little bit by
>         adding 
> 
> You should delay that project until I agree with the CERN people and
> the Karlsruhe University for the database cleaning. Things will
> heavily change soon.

Yep. I got that message. My code is very easy to change.



> While the savannah code base can be enhanced in many ways, while we
> should have multiple computers (which is not a problem with the
> current code base), 

It is a problem with the current code base. Our scalability plan is
ever bigger machines. That is obviously a bad scalability plan.


> I do not agree at all with the idea that the current system let us
> to much work to do. It has not worked for two years without proving
> to be a little bit useful.  There is much to do for the codebase,
> not for the administration -- and it's not even really a manpower
> issue.

It's not a bad system. I'm not critising the savannah code or the
marvellous work you and all the other savannah hackers have done. But
there is room for improvement. As a fledgling savannah hacker
(without a lot of time) I feel the need for more tools to monitor the
situation. With such tools I would feel confident enough that I could
manage savannah on my own for a week, even with my limited time.