Savannah Task List

Other pages

• CVS contains some tasks related to the CVS setup
• Git presents the progress with http://git.or.cz/ support
• SvNTasks explains what we need to improve SVN
• SavaneTasks gives various ideas (easy and hard) to improve the Savane software which runs Savannah

Web pages

• Accessibility: this would be a good area for a new contributor to start on, since changes are independent and (some are) small. Many improvements were proposed: a summary of acessibility issues was posted on savannah-hackers in 2015; more in another report and a private message.

System

• Read-only bind mounts changed in recent kernel, and this results in /home being read-only when rebooting a vserver. Upgrade util-vserver or work-around.
• user katzchen is continously removed and recreated by the sv_users cron job. Investigate.
• The Cacti CPU graph is apparently graphing "idle" when it's graphing "user". This makes people believe the CPU is loaded, while it's not (cf. Munin CPU graph and the anti-peak on march 4th when I artificially loaded the CPU)

Documentation

• Make a clear, simple, illustrated explanation of the use of SSH public keys. That's not a very simple concept (PKI + keygen + passphrase + ssh-agent + ssh-add + pros over password-authentication).

Download area

• Suggest unifying alpha, ftp, download.sv. This could be easily done by setting Savannah as the main upload area, and have it replicate signed files to ftp.gnu.org and alpha.gnu.org (this involves adding a new download area for GNU packages).
• Per-group stats?

Internal

• document backing-up
• We need to keep several pieces of information out of Savannah:
  • contacts: get something automated to have your local copy in-sync
  • password (TLS CA + Zope + Mailman - others can be found in Savannah or MySQL config files): make a script to maintain a crypted file that contains the passes. Optionaly have the order of the passes scrambled at each regeneration (so no assumption can be made on several successive versions of the file) and do not rely on temporary files during the update. Optionaly do not put the passes in a file, but in each of our brains, and scrap this whole idea.

Mailing lists

• Clean up mailing lists from old spam http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?103933

Translations

Unlike one of our proprietary competitors, we do not have a translation web interface. Installing Pootle and integrating it with Savane would be great. Other improvements would be to connect it directly to the repository to edit the .po using a more intuitive web interface.

Note: as of 2019, Pootle out-of-box doesn't comply with GNU philosophy (e.g. it doesn't provide JavaScript labels), so it should be substantially patched before deploying.

The Translation Project (https://www.translationproject.org/) doesn't have tools to edit the .po and .pot per se, but they have a publication system to manage them by team. It manages a good part of the GNU packages, including coreutils and GCC. The source code can be found at http://svn.vrijschrift.org/tp-repo/TP/.

Tools to work with .po:

• http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/index - the Translate Toolkit, used by Pootle.

• http://code.google.com/p/polib/ - .po parser

Other projects:

• Entrans: http://entrans.sourceforge.net/demo/main.php

• Ikiwiki: http://ikiwiki.info/ (a native translation plugin using po4a is under development)

Wiki

Provide a wiki for groups: problems include spam and replication for 2500+ groups. Or 1 big wiki for everybody, but we need to have a solid spam protection first. The goal is to avoid setting up a wiki that will be filled with spam, with not enough visitors to fix it (we're not as big as Wikipedia just yet ;)). Note that WikiSpam is usually different than (unfortunately) more common mail spam.

The format used by the wiki is also important. It would be good to be able to switch to another wiki system in the future, if needed.

Suggestion for anti-spam: I think that one of the most useful anti-spam features would actually be statistics. We have numerous anti-spam systems in different areas, but little data on how much spam was caught, nor ways to quickly review caught spam to check for possible false positives. It would be good to have a set of anti-spam features that we could enable or disable, and then see how effective it was.

Another discussion: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers-public/2009-01/msg00003.html

• Official .gnu.org web pages need to be validated by maintainers and their team - open wiki can be a problem.

  • work-around: manual sync from temp wiki site to .gnu.org for the Hurd Wiki
  • disallow non-member contribution (not recommended)
  • find a nice wiki for that, consuming little resource
  • or provide a big wiki for everybody

• Plan something against spam (TextCHA seems to work fine at the moment)