Re: About savannah, KLog and KMeter

[Jaime Robles]

Dear all,

Thank you for your time managing this issue.

I need to say that there are some lessons learned from this incident on
both sides.

On Savannah, in my opinion, you can't afford acting like in KLog and
removing a project like this, you may, for instance, disable any writing
rights and users would not be so affected and history of free software
would not lose so much code.

I personally had some copies of all the sources and the mailing lists are
not really containing such a big amount of information so nothing
"catastrophic" happened to KLog  but this may not be the case in other
projects.

IMHO, that was not an action of a reliable partner... and you are not like
GitLab, GitHub, Sourceforge... you represent free software.

On the other hand, as I was saying, lessons learned are on both sides and I
will apply mine.

However, I still think today that hosting KLog in Savannah is for the
community,  better than not doing so even if KLog is an small project, so I
will send a new submission to Savannah with the hope that we don't go this
way again, at least during the same amount of years than the first chapter
of KLog with you ;-)

Thank you for your time.

Jaime

El mar., 6 abr. 2021 12:45, Jose E. Marchesi <jemarch@gnu.org> escribió:

>
> Hello Jaime.
>
> Thanks for your patience.
>
> So we have carefully looked at the issue.  What happened, in a nutshell:
>
> 1) The KLog project has indeed been hosted in savannah.nongnu.org for
>    many years.  The group was registered in 2002, and you imported the
>    sources in a SVN repository in 2011.
>
> 2) In 30 April 2020 you submitted an application for another project, to
>    be hosted in savannah.nongnu.org: KMeter.  During the evaluation of
>    the submission the savannah hackers found some problems that violate
>    the savannah hosting requirements, and they reached out to you in
>    this savannah task ticket:
>
>    Savannah Administration - Tasks: task #15622, Submission of KMeter
>    https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?15622
>
>    As you can see in task #15622 they tried to get in touch with you in
>    three occassions:
>
>    - Fri 08 May 2020
>    - Sun 31 May 2020
>    - Mon 15 Mar 2021
>
>    With no answer from you.  You are supposed to get email notifications
>    from Savannah when somebody replies to you in a forum, so maybe you
>    want to check your savannah settings?  Maybe you have an email
>    address there that you no longer use?
>
>    In any case, in these messages the savannah hackers told you that
>    they had also found similar problems in the existing project KLog,
>    not just in the submission of KMeter:
>
>      "Please be sure to fix these issues in this package and in other
>
>       your packages hosted in Savannah."
>
>    And then almost a year later after no response:
>
>      "No further interest?  Should I cancel this submission and delete
>      your package from Savannah?"
>
>    We reckon we should have been more explicit in that communication in
>    that we were talking about removing the KLog project.  We apologize
>    for that.
>
> 3) We proceeded to discard the KMeter application and to remove the KLog
>    project from savannah, due to these policy violation _and_ because
>    the maintainer/submitter appeared to be missing in action for the
>    good part of a year.
>
> Good news is that we finally managed to reach you! :)
> So, what can we do now?
>
> - Regarding KLog, the group has been removed from savannah.  However, we
>   have backups of the VCS, download area and the mailing list archives.
>   If you are still interested in hosting the KLog project in savannah,
>   we invite you to start a new submission.  The savannah hackers will
>   then evaluate it and guide you in fixing any problem that makes it not
>   compatible with the savannah policies.  Once approved and a new group
>   gets created, we can then restore the VCS, download areas and the
>   mailing list archives.
>
> - Regarding KMeter, the application has been closed due to lack of
>   response.  So if you are still interested in hosting it in savannah,
>   please start a new submission and work with the savannah hackers to
>   make it compatible with the savannah hosting requirements.
>
> Again, we apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to work
> with you :)
>
> Salud!
>
>