Re: Components

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> Behdad has some experience with Savannah about GNU FriBidi, and may want
> to share it with us. Behdad?

Right.  Well, I assumed that the problems are common knowledge.
The problem is that but gnu.org and freedesktop.org severly lack
on administrative resources.  As a result, both become unusable a
couple of times a year on average, and the aftereffect may linger
as long as a few months (in the case of gnu.org.)  With both of
them, a mailing list request may go unreplied for your lifetime,
and the next /intrusion/ that happens may make you lose your work
if you do not have personal backups.  As an example, the recent
raid controller failure at fd.o has left mailman lists broken and
bugzilla attachments missing.  As the GNU FriBidi maintainer
since 2002, I still do not know how to update the outdated
information about my project on gnu.org web pages.

On the other hand, with gnome.org, the worst I have experience is
services being unavailable until one of the admins (Owen Taylor
most probably) wakes up and fixes it.  Never seen bits getting
lost, and there are several rsynced mirrors available anyway.
The fact that the servers are localted and administered by Red
Hat should have something with it, but that doesn't make any
difference in the discussion.

To conclude, yes, I wish I have had not moved FriBidi away from
sf.net.  The only reason I did was lack of bugzilla.  One more
plus for GNOME is its very structured, well-maintained, and
supported bugzilla and the community around that, which happens
to be an integrated part of efficient development IMHO.

> roozbeh


Cheers,

--behdad
http://behdad.org/