On 08/15/2014 07:40 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
I finally got to the end of the messages in this thread. My view FWIW follows ...Should Savannah require projects to be at least build-able on of the GNU systems. The answer is no.
I guess this closes the issue. I'll try to revisit it in the future when I come up with better arguments.
On the other hand, I completely agree that we should *encourage* people to use the free distros, and/or make it easier for evaluators wherever possible. Changing the wiki page to strongly recommend giving exact package names for dependencies where possible, and (even more so) to check copyright statements for themselves, would be excellent improvements. I'm sure plenty more could be done there, and/or on the submission page itself. Let's continue on that path.
I'm reviewing few projects (for the first time), and that's exactly what I was thinking. Here's what I've got: http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/gnu_savannah_eval.sh This script scans the files in the current directory, and checks the following: 1. Files with whitespaces 2. compiled binary files 3. long text files without recognizable copyright 4. long text files without recognizable license 5. plain-text license file 6. binary data files (e.g. png/jpg) 7. misuse of the term 'linux' All these items are reported as suggestions. Obviously there's so much variation that there's no sure-proof way to detect everything. Items #1 and #2 are not strict requirement, but they make life easier (I hope you'll agree). Item #3 - 'long' means more than 10 lines. 'recognizable' means a regex that can catch most common cases. item #4 - 'recognizable' means fragments of the most common license (e.g GPL/BSD/X11) are found in the file. Item #3 and #4 are cheap heuristics. But I think it will catch most cases where either: there's no copyright/license; or there's a copy&pasted copyright and license (which is properly detected). Item #5 - looks for the most common names for these files. not a strict requirement, but makes life easier. item #6 - if PNG/JPG/etc files are found, a warning is shown telling the developer to mention something about these files in the README file. item #7 - some heuristics to catch the most common cases of misused 'linux' term. There are *always* nuances, this file should only be used as a guidance for new submission. But I hope it can help. Examples, three recently submitted projects in Savannah with the output of this script: ## JNoteBook https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?13287 http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/JNotebook_eval.txt ## RufasCube https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?13292 http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/rufascube_eval.txt ## SciteProj https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?13282 http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/sciteproj_git_eval.txt And as a control, here's the same script output, on GNU Coreutils and GNU Grep: http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/grep_git_eval.txt http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/coreutils_git_eval.txt There are clearly false-positives here, but often, these are small files (10-20 lines) which really don't carry copyright or license. If/when this script is hosted on Savannah, user can run it directly, as so: wget -qO- http://files.housegordon.org/datamash/tmp/gnu_savannah_eval.sh | sh And we can require (=*highly* recommend) to at least attach the output of the script on the submitted project - this will show some effort from the submitter. The script is portable enough to run on GNU/Linux [ :) ] and on FreeBSD 10. It's commented and I hope it's understandable so that more checks could be added later. Let me know what you think.
Finally, I agree with Ineiev that the numerous nonfunctional projects simply are not a problem. I would guess without looking that the majority of the ~3500 projects on Savannah are not functional and not being actively developed. That doesn't mean they are consuming any notable resources beyond some disk space (we have plenty), and certainly doesn't mean they should be deleted.
"Delete" is a strong word... especially that on Savannah no piece free-software code should ever be deleted... (at least in theory?). But how about some form of archiving? as-in, moving to some read-only place? locking the mailing-lists ? But of course, this is another long-term discussion... perhaps for later. -Assaf
