Re: A new comer and an offer to Savannah

Loic Dachary wrote:
> Laurent Julliard writes:
>  > a) I'm going to set-up a replicate of Savannah here at Xerox and 
>  > integrate my code in it.
> 
> 	If you feel like it, I see no problem with this. It requires
> more work on your side and we won't be able to help during this phase...
> but that's your time ;-)
> 
> 	Since the changes do not relate to backend scripts, setting up
> Savannah on your side should be possible with the usual amount of
> manual tweaking. You'll find that we modified the database a bit
> (removed a field here and there, added a few: a diff on the current
> schema will make this clear). I attached the current savannah database
> schema to this mail.

Thanks. I'll setup a partially working Savannah site (no backend 
scripts) to make sure I understand the differences with our CodeX 
platform. I had Savannah almost working in a couple of hours on our 
CodeX test bed last time I tried. So it should not take that much time.

> 
>  > b) once this is done it would be great to test it on the Savannah test 
>  > bed (you have a test server, right?)
> 
> 	No we don't. Although we could do it for the occasion without
> too much trouble. The primary reason for not having a test server is
> that we're too lazy. The secondary reason is that we're not doing large
> scale modifications. When we do modify things it occasionnaly breaks 
> the service during a few minutes but that's an inconvenience people 
> forgive us, apparently ;-)
> 

I don't know why but I would have bet you had no test bed ;-) It's an 
additional reason for me to integrate my code here first to make sure I 
won't break anything in Savannah because the changes I'll make are not 
small ones.


>  > c) If b) is ok with everyboby we can commit the changes and put it in 
>  > place on the production server
> 
> 	Something you'll need to be extra careful is that you indeed
> have an official permission to release the modifications under the GNU
> GPL. There are many ways to achieve this, I guess you already thought
> about it. In order to prevent problems, I'd appreciate if you could
> send an official letter explaining this to FSFE France, 8 rue de
> Valois, 75001 Paris. That will clarify the situation in this respect,
> once for all.

I do have the official permission from Xerox and I can sign any relevant 
documents requested by the FSFE. Is there a form of some sort available 
somewhere. One thing though is that we want the Xerox Copyright to 
remain in all the files we have heavily modified. Is this a problem at 
all?  I guess it isn't provided Xerox signs a Copyright assigment to the 
FSFE, right?

> 
> 	Another issue that we'll have to address is the php4
> dependencies.  The current Savannah runs on php3 (as a protest to the
> zend license that forbids people to distribute modified versions of
> php4). Although zend promised to change the license to "BSD like" some
> months ago, they did not do it yet and we therefore continue to
> protest. It may be the case that your code is highly dependent on php4
> in which case it will require a fair amount of work to make it run
> on php3. The phpgroupware code base will help us in this respect since
> they have loads of functions that emulate the php4 behaviour but it
> will require attention anyway. If your code is only slightly dependent
> on php4, arranging it to run on php3 will hopefully be painless.
> For information, the SF-2.0 code base that we have in common is only
> slightly dependent on php4 and we only had to do little modifications
> to make it run on php3.
> 

CodeX still runs on PHP3. So this is no problem.

Laurent