Follow-up Comment #2, sr #107183 (project administration):
I feel a bit guilty as I advised Robert to ask the Savannah hackers for this,
although I knew in advance what the reply would be. At least he deserves some
explanation why things are what they are. I'll try to describe that from my
POV.
Initially, Savannah was only for GNU packages. The webpages under
gnu.org/software/<package> were maintained mostly by the GNU webmasters, along
with the rest of the site. GNU maintainers typically only dealt with their
code; only a few of them tried to keep their webpages up to date.
So the Savannah WebCVS setup was made in a way that all members of the "www"
project (i.e. all GNU webmasters) have write access to the projects' web
repositories. (The implementation is complex, I think, and very different
from gna.org.) This continued after the inception of the "nongnu" area, and
is still true today. It was also handy for orphaned packages -- putting a
notice that a new maintainer is needed is a good thing in general.
However, we (we == the GNU webmasters, or more precisely, at least Karl and
I) no longer find it acceptable to edit projects' webpages without the
maintainers' consent. It is intrusive, pushy and simply wrong. The
maintainers know best about their package, and maintain.texi contains (for a
long time now) instructions that maintaining the website of the project is the
maintainer's responsibility.
So the current Savannah setup for the web repositories is unnecessary, and
needless to say -- a burden for many people who would like to use Subversion,
Bzr, Git, etc. There were several requests in the past to use !CVS for a
project website. But as Sylvain says, it is not trivial to do it, and it's
not on top of the TODO list. I hope it could be done some day in the
foreseeable future.
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