[Savannah-hackers] savannah sucks

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

I still cannot check my work into savannah, because they suck.  That's
the short story.

The long story:

I said, to cvs-hackers, "my account seems not to work any more,
perhaps as a result of the security lossage on fencepost."  Message
was ignored.  Can you set the password for me and mail it back
encrypted? 

I said the same thing to savannah-hackers.  I was told that I didn't
need a shell account.  I replied back "wtf, stop treating me like a
peon". 

I finally figured out how to set the web page password.  How?  Because
it's totally insecure.  So I could do it myself.  (Would you like me
to change yours for you?)  I even put in a request to create the cvs
directory for gpc, thinking that I didn't have a shell account.  That
succeeded, because it's something they can do by rote.

To access the cvs directory, you need an ssh key exchange; you specify
your public key on some web page.  I did that.

Key still doesn't work.  The page where you specify it says "keys
specified here will be ignored if you have a shell account."  Hrm.
I used to have a shell account, maybe I still do, despite the
insistence that I didn't need one.

Ah hah!  I can log in using my GNU kerberos principal on
subversions.gnu.org--but not savannah.gnu.org, which perhaps doesn't
have a kerberos login principal.

So I set ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on subversions.  But I can't get even
scp commands to work, whichever host name I try.

I would happily ignore all of this stupidity and use a password, but I
don't know what my password *is* on subversions.  My initial request,
remember, was to change my password so that I could use it.

This is really grotesque.  *Somebody* with competence and clue needs
to be responsible for making this stuff work--that means, when my
first request "please change the password for me" is the *right*
request, dammit, to not give me grief, but to actually help out.  

Paul Fisher said "it should work", but that doesn't help--it doesn't.
He has clue, but is essentially remote from savannah administration
IIUC, and it's not his fault that savannah sucks.

So far Mathieu Roy has been the only savannah hacker to respond, and
he's the one who has demonstrated the cluelessness described above.
Hopefully there is *someone* else who can make things work.

Regardless, I now officially give up.  I have a valid ssh public key
on subversions in ~/thomas/.ssh/authorized_keys.  If I get a working
password so that I can do CVS, or it otherwise works, then I'm happy
to check my project in to cvs on savannah.  Anyone with commands they
think I should type, please suggest them and I'll type them.  But I've
wasted far too many hours so far trying to make this work, and I'm not
going to waste more.

Thomas