Re: [savannah-help-public] Using mod_proxy to host the project homepage elsewhere

[Bob Proulx]

> The thing is, when someone uses www.nongnu.org, they get
> their access after agreeing to our policies (when they registered
> their savannah project).  E.g., they agreed not to promote proprietary
> software on their web pages.
> 
> Spreading that a step further to arbitrary hosting anywhere ... no.
> This is also a (philosophical) argument against mod_proxy, or
> mod_rewrite stuff, etc.  
> If people host web pages elsewhere, we don't want there to be any
> necessary connection to gnu or savannah.

Okay.  I think I have enough to answer this request.  I am going to
basically say:

Hello Paulo,

> Is there any way you could activate it? Otherwise, is there any
> other way I could achieve this (without using ugly iframes)?

In summary I think the answer is no.  Sorry.  I don't know of any way
to accomplish what you are asking.  But there are several points that
your question raises.  Rather than simply saying, sigh, not possible,
let me address some of them.

* Being able to host more fancy web pages is nice in concept but that
we just don't have the resources to actually do it.  Sorry.  PHP might
be lightweight enough but Rails/Django are both rather heavy weight
servers and both require significant resources to keep updated against
security vulnerabilities.  Can you imagine if just 10% of the projects
hosted wanted to have a unique web service hosted?  That would be
completely overwhelming!

* The web pages are actually hosted on the FSF servers.  Those are
organizationally distinct from the Savannah site and team.  We the
Savannah Hackers don't have administrative access to them.  For
anything related to the web pages all administrative control is
through the FSF admins.

* Your mod_proxy wouldn't actually do what you wanted it to do.  You
would redirect away from black.nongnu.org and over to www.google.com
and then the user would be there.  Any bookmarks would see the new
site.  Effectively you wouldn't be using black.nongnu.org at all at
that point.  (And I don't think anyone would like the idea of
redirecting over to www.google.com.)

* It looks like you are trying to use a .htaccess file.  Those have a
bad reputation for slowing down servers.  If enabled they require the
server to make a large number of stat(2) calls for every page served.
They are never enabled by default.  Again this is up to the FSF admins
but personally I would never enable them.  You might want to read:
https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/Htaccess

And so I don't really have an answer that you will like.  I might
suggest that for some of the things you are asking you might try
setting them up for yourself.  Then you will see the problems of
trying to do it on a thousand projects.  Whatever is done must be able
to scale to a large number of projects and must be manageable for a
long time with minimal people resources.  It's a problem!

Bob