[Savannah-register-public] Re: task #8733, Submission of Parser Playground

[Alexander Shulgin]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 5:12 AM, Sebastian Pipping
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello Alexander!
>
>
> I hope you have a minute for me, I think you are the
> best to turn to - in a minute you'll know why.

Hi Sebastian,

I'm sorry if you get that bad impression of Savannah registration process.

Unfortunately the current problem is:

a. Project review is done by volunteers.
b. We are very short of time.

We are doing our best to keep up the project review, but now there's
like a 2 months lag between project submission and actual review. :-/

> I wanted to register "Parser Playground" with Savannah
> because I needed Git repository hosting and some kind
> of "project home" for people to see and join around it.
> After studying the "Comparison of open source software
> hosting facilities" at Wikipedia [1] Savannah seemed
> to be a natural candidate for me - it's very near to
> GNU and FSF and seems to be everything that SourceForge
> is moving away from.
>
> Somewhere on Savannah ground I read that Savannah is
> said to process project registrations faster than SF.
> While the task opened itself speaks of 10 days I cannot
> remember ever waiting 10 days for a new project on SF.
> I mailed Yavor Doganov if there's a chance to speed
> up processing of my request, though I'm not sure if
> that would have been "fair" to other requesters.
> No reply. When I decided to give up waiting, open
> a repository at a server of mine, and close the bug
> somebody (you) was right there to close the task.
> I understand cleanup is good and needed.  What I wonder
> about is why a request without a source tarball takes
>>10 days to accept or request further information
> and just a half to close?

I think there's something psychological here--we know there's lots of
submitted projects waiting for review and making the number smaller by
one makes us feel a bit better.  On the other hand we feel sorry if
this is because people give up waiting for approval.

> Why is a tarball requested on
> registration - what if I'm starting at zero?
> Why is license babysitting done and why is it a required-
> come-back-when-fixed-loop instead of an accompanying service?
> I gained this impression from the <savannah-register-public>
> mailing list.

We request a tarball to help you catch potential legal problems early:
correct copyright & license notices, license-compatible project
dependencies, no non-free dependencies, etc.  However, there's no
problem if you start with no source code--we generally accept such
projects and review uploaded sources in a month or so.

> I'm not asking because of Parser Playground - maybe it
> would have been right to even actively reject it - but this
> is not the last project I need hosting for. Fedorahosted
> seems to have similar services and makes a good impression
> to me but do I really have to go there? I mean why is
> Savannah working this way? Is this the message Savannah
> wants to send?
>
> If you feel like I'm wasting your time or in case Savannah
> has a special person for this kind of mails please forward
> and CC me.
>
> Thanks for listening,
>
>
>
> Sebastian
>
>
> [1] 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_hosting_facilities

--
Regards,
Alex