Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Porting savane from PHP to Perl on version 3.1-cleanup

[Karl Berry]

Troye,

Very glad to hear about your interest and all this work.
Overall, the direction you are taking seems good to me.
If we can end up with a generic installable forge package,
that would be fantastic.

Savane/Savannah code is not copyrighted by the FSF, so there is nothing
to sign.

Minor: there is a db-agnostic front end called "GNU SQL" included in the
GNU Parallel package.  Maybe it can be useful if such is needed at the
command-line level, as I think you may have mentioned.  (I've never
looked at it, just know of its existence.  From the Perl side, of course
is DBI.)

However, there are major obstacles before any such substantial changes
can actually be deployed.

1) The live Savannah is currently running out of repositories coming
from the "administration" project (as I recall, git, svn, cvs, and bzr
are all used), rather than the "savane-cleanup" (or any other)
repository.  I did not set it up, but that is the reality as I found it.
Therefore, a first step for doing anything based on savane-cleanup is to
compare savane-cleanup (before your changes) to administration.  I do
not know if the differences are major, minor, or nonexistent; I haven't
had time to push this.

For general background, I would suggest reading through the wiki pages
(http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance, coming from the svn repository in
"administration").  There is an unfortunate mix of good, bad, current,
and stale information there, but it's what we've got.  (Reviews and
updates are sorely needed, as ever.)


2) Assaf Gordon is another recent volunteer who has made some
significant steps towards making a developable Savannah again.  In a
previous post on this list, he gave a link to a recipe he has developed
to making a local-to-your-machine installation.  Obviously it's not
desirable to experiment with the live host.

Please try looking it up, or maybe Assaf can give the link again.
(Or put it in the wiki.)


Thanks again for coming forward and taking up all this work.
I hope we can eventually bring it to fruition, but it won't be quick.

If you want to help with current project submissions and/or requests,
please see
http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/HowToBecomeASavannahHacker for basic
info, such as it is.

Best,
Karl