<Personal opinion> Savane is old. The interface looks straight from the early 2000s at best, it is cluttered, the default color scheme scares users away. </Personal opinion>
Not to mention the fact that on the homepage, there are just few "news" and some are as old as 2011, which make the site look poorly maintained, and most of the "Help wanted" and "Most popular items" were posted in the 2000s, and rarely changed since then. The source code isn't badly written but it generates HTML by printing it instead of using templates (example [1]), so it's hard to modify. And while I applaud it for offering many features which other project hosting sites don't offer (like mailing lists and web hosting), it also lacks some features which are considered basic nowadays, like Pull Requests (not the same as patches), a file viewer with syntax highlighting or showing the contents of READMEs immediately. And yes, I am referring to features offered by Github and Bitbucket, which are (sadly) the most popular project hosting platforms. Of course, Savannah shouldn't really be directly compared to them, because it offers many more functionalities and focuses on freedom, but at the same time, if the purpose is to get people to switch to more ethical repositories ([2]), an effort should be made to be at least half as appealing as those sites. Sadly, Savannah can't migrate to the two most popular free project hosting solutions around, Gitlab ([3], used by GNU Social, a GNU package, which is telling about the reluctance even GNU developers have to use Savannah) and Gogs ([4]), because they lack many features that are essential to it (CVS and SVN support above all). I doubt Savannah could ever migrate to a new system but in that case, the only choice would be Redmine (used by GNURadio, what I said about Gitlab also applies in this case [5]), but mailing list and website integration should be implemented from scratch anyway and I'd still consider it ugly, but at least it would be a huge step up in usability. If I could rewrite Savannah's interface from scratch (and had web design skills), I would adopt OpenProject's ([6]), minus the JavaScript requirement. But I think we all know that nobody is going to improve Savane - mostly due to a lack of good designers in the free software community, not a lack of intent - so it'd be better if the GNU Project offered an official Gitlab or Gogs instance, so that people won't have to host their software somewhere else, far from the scrutiny and control of the FSF (like it's already happening, and there are even GNU packages on Github [7]). Savannah could still be used for mailing lists and websites and by existing projects (such as the GNU website), and perhaps be integrated with those services, but I simply don't think it's good to recommend it to free software developers as a project hosting solution anymore. My biggest problem with Savannah is that its being so unwelcoming to new contributors prevents projects like GuixSD from being more popular, and that affects users. I think that it'd be better to admit a factual truth (that a very small percentage of free software developers uses or even knows about Savannah) and adapt rather than ignore it and drive many programmers toward services Github by pretending Savannah can ever be relevant again. [1]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/administration/savane.git/plain/frontend/php/cvs/index.php [2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html [3]: https://git.gnu.io/explore/projects [4]: https://notabug.org/explore [5]: https://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio [6]: https://community.openproject.org/projects/openproject/ [7]: https://github.com/mtytel/cursynth
