Rewriting Savane
I (ineiev) believe that all the info below is of historical interest only.
Savane is the base software which both savannah and gna.org used, at one point, due to Sylvain Beucler's efforts.
Nowadays, however, Savannah is effectively forked; the "administration" project on Savannah is the only one with live source files, using several of the VC systems; also, there is often uncommitted changes languishing in the live hierarchies (unfortunate but true). We don't try to incorporate patches from the original Savane, which isn't actively being developed, anyway.
Sylvain and others have undertaken various efforts over the years to rewrite Savane. In 2014, Sylvain started a project to rebase Savane on FusionForge. I (Karl) believe that there is a plan for gna.org to be switched over. Whether Savannah will follow suit is yet to be determined.
Past rewrite
I (Karl) believe all the info below here is obsolete, per the above, but retaining for whatever historical purpose it may serve.
Video: talk at LSM - mirror
Savane is the piece of software that runs Savannah: it interfaces users and system administration. Savane manages a list of members and services for each project, and provides a flexible bug/task/support tracker. It's also responsible for replicating project services (Git, Bazaar, mailing lists, webpages, etc.) to the system.
Basically we drop the current old PHP code, and replace it using better tools, namely
- Python: a much better programming language
- Django: a web framework with good documentation that is easy to learn (check their excellent tutorial)
- CSS: we want an improved web design :)
Status:
- The code is available at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/savane.git
- Live demo at http://demo.savane-forge.org:8080/
- New homepage (in construction) at http://savane-forge.org/
- The project foundations are ready, we're currently implementing user interface screens
- The new backend (system), relying on direct database sync rather than delayed replication, is already in production on live Savannah.
- To try a full system, QEMU and VirtualBox disk images are available at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/savane/test-install/
- Or, try cd tests/minimal_configs/ && make install, as mentioned in the INSTALL file.
- Or, try checking out the new code and read the INSTALL file.