Re: [Savannah-hackers] experience as a new savannah user

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Mathieu Roy <address@hidden>

    > We already discussed the possibility of using arch on
    > Savannah. We reached the conclusion that we need a modular
    > system that permit project to use CVS or Arch or Subversion, at
    > their option.

    > It's on the todo list too. I'm a bit concerned by the fact that
    > where I am on vacation I haven't got a decent connectivity. But
    > in september, I'll be in Swiss to work on Savannah so I'll try
    > to work on this if possible (there are some endless issue that
    > need to get and end before).


That's great.  I may be missing some names but it looks like the set
of people who have expressed interest in working on arch support or
even started working on it are:

        savannah hackers:

                Mathieu Roy
                Sam Vilain (on SFTP issues)
                Jamie E Villate 
 
        arch hackers:

                Tom Lord
                Jonathan Walther

I understand the Savannah requirements from the arch folks to be:

        1) explanation of what is needed to allow users to create
           arch archives for their projects

        2) explanation of how to provide access control to archives
           based on unix user groups

        3) software to provide an alternative to viewcvs for arch

An answer to (1) is, roughly, direct SFTP access to an anonymously
readable FTP area and (2) is, roughly, to set the permissions and
ownership of the top level directory in that area correctly.
If I understand correctly, Jonathan Walther is helping to work out
some issues with the SFTP support on Savannah.

The answer to (3) is trickier.   We have a tool along those lines
(called Perspective, by Alexander Deruwe) but I have a hunch that it
is (a) too resource intensive to use on Savannah;  (b) too demanding
of browser capabilities.   The resource issue is primarily disk space
-- I think that Perspective would raise the amount of disk-spaced used
by arch projects quite a bit.

As I said, it looks as though work on the SFTP issues has already
started.   Even _before_ arch becomes one of the official alternatives
to CVS on Savannah I think people will want to host public arch
archives there -- arch is quite useful even without Perspective or
anything else viewcvs-like and really requires nothing more than that
SFTP-writable anonymous FTP area.

We've had some discussions on arch-users about how to solve the
viewcvs problem -- I think we'll be able to come up with a minimalist
solution sometime this month, and build on that from there.

Aside from the work on SFTP, Mathieu suggested taking a look at this
in the last week of August and Jamie has suggested September -- so
that's the timeframe I've been planning on to get more involved in
this personally.

Something that _hasn't_ come up yet is the way that web pages are
driven by CVS on Savannah.   I'm not sure whether or not there's
interest in allowing them to be driven by arch instead.

Finally, some dangling points:

* sftp isn't the only option

  One alternative that works today is WebDAV access.   Another
  alternative that is on the horizon is a CGI-based access to
  remote archives.

* is http (non WebDAV) read-only archive access important?

  I noticed that for project distributions, both FTP and HTTP
  access is provided.   Are there users unable to read from Savannah
  using anonymous SFTP?

  arch has support for plain-http read-only access to archives
  however to deploy it with the least amount of confusion to
  users, I think we'd want to do a little bit of additional hacking 
  to add a URI rewrite rule and CGI script which can generate 
  something called ".listing files" (which contain directory listings
  of directories in archives) on-the-fly.

-t