Re: A new comer and an offer to Savannah

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.

 > 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 ;-)

 > 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.

	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.


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