Follow-up Comment #5, bug #2880 (project savane):
> I wont argue about /etc usage. I will be pretentious enough to
> know a bit what is supposed to be in /etc for being using
> GNU/Linux since 1999.
I am not trying to besmirch your *n*x skills! Just a difference of
philosophy. Some of us like to keep our system bin, lib, and so on
directories very "clean", and keep binaries and the like that relate only to
a particular application inside subdirectories of that application's
installation directory. It'd be nice to have the option to do so with
savane, that's all.
If it's not something that a human user will ever run, some of us don't like
it showing up in /usr/local/bin, etc.
> Clearly, this membersh conffile is poorly documented. But you
> now, you are getting here for free here. So you have to take
> it the way it comes. So keep off the "What the fuck" and
> things will only do better.
D'oh! The "WTF?" was intended to be ironic/humourous, nothing more. No
offense intended! If it was a "WTF?" inside my own config file, that's just
a keyword I search on for "something I don't understand which needs to be
resolved later" so I don't have to try to memorize 50 different pending
issues in 15 different config files. It's a short string that isn't likely
to appear unless I put it there. I guess I could use "[EMAIL PROTECTED]@^", but
that would be harder to remember. :-)
> When you are asking people to help you on their free time,
> the least you can do is not to take everything for granted.
> I tell it you now because I'm getting irritated a bit.
Understood, absolutely.
> Not that I dislike criticism,
It's OK, we all do. >;-) I am not trying to criticize you or anyone else
working on this project, just trying to be *constructively* critical about
some of the output. Like, it is a different thing to say that an essay I
wrote has a flaw in its reasoning, or bad grammar in one spot, and how to fix
it on the one hand, and say I'm stupid or a jerk on the other hand. I intend
no disrespect to you or the rest of the Savane or Savane-Doc teams.
> but when you obtain a libre software for free, not via a
> vendor or a support business, you're a bit welcome to put
> your hands into the mud when it does not work like it is
> supposed to.
[...]
> And then, a comment saying "this conffile is not helpful,
> you should mention *that* and *that*" would have been greatly >
appreciated.
Yes, I have been endeavoring to do quite a lot of this, with one suggestion
per Support Tracker ticket, so that they can all be handled separately. I'm
not just complaining about the docs, but making improvement recommendations
where I can. Thus the whole day of going over the docs and conf file
comments and making specific recommendations for how to improve each
section.
> Understand that your requests are interesting, because what
> you do not understand is what many others persons will not
> understand. And the overall goal is to make the whole thing
> being understandable. So we have to take those into account.
Exactly. I've been using Unix as a "power user" since 1990, and as a system
administrator of at least a beginner level since around 1995, and more
seriously since around 2002. Savane is *difficult* (as is GForge, etc. - I
am not picking on Savane in particular) for someone who is not already
familiar with the administration of SourceForge. I think that is the main
issue with the docs and install/configure process. Many things that are
totally obvious to you and to many others are not at all obvious, in any way,
to someone not already experienced with the internal administration of such a
system.
> But I would only be better if you were in fact also
> trying to help, for instance by avoiding saying "fix this"
> every 15 lines.
Sorry. I am not trying to be a bother. But, I am not certain I see the
difference between 'saying "fix this"' where ever I see an issue (which seems
to annoy you) and 'a comment saying "this conffile is not helpful, you should
mention *that* and *that*"' (which you just said would be helpful). I've
been trying to be very specific about where I think the
documentation/comments don't explain something, and how to improve them. I
think I may've come across as rude or hot-tempered when I was simply trying
to be concise and fast. A common problem with online communication, lacking
voice tone, facial expression, etc. And I don't use smileys enough maybe.
:-)
> I hope you dont take that personally and dont feel aggressed,
No, not at all.
> but sometimes it is necessary to clear up things.
Yes. I don't want to offend anyone or be a thorn in anyone's side. I don't
mind being "set straight" when I need to be. Heh.
> Otherwise, people tend to just ignore each others to avoid
> clashes and nuisance.
Understood, and certainly not my goal here!
Anyway, as to the documentation and your note on another thread about
submitting actual code/doc contributions before attempting to join the
savane-doc project, I certainly understand that and could happily do an edit
of those docs with various suggested clarifications, but I'd need answers to
a number of question before doing so (even being a professional technical
writer, I can't provide an answer I don't have!) Your recent clarification
of what the "Homepage" stuff means in the Group Type config was very helpful
in that regard, but I have a number of remaining questions about the fields
on that page. It was not immediately clear that "Homepage" meant something
other than the "Main" page for the Group.
I'd be happy to ask these questions in a straightforward way in e-mail, and
save them for a near-future revision suggestion for savane-doc.
This next part should maybe be its own Support ticket, classified as "Feature
Request", but I'll leave that to your discretion:
As a future improvement idea, I'd suggest a terminology adjustment and some
menu changes. I think most people will think of
savane.mysite.com/projects/%PROJECT as "the homepage" of the project; having
something else called "Homepage" is confusing. It strikes me that what
Savane calls "Homepage" is really something more like a "Documentation and
Additional Project Info" page. Given that, and the ability to add an admin
documentation "extra" page, AND that the link presently called "Server Admin
Docs" isn't docs at all but admin features, I think the conceptual structure
of this stuff could be adjusted a little to be less confusing by doing the
following:
* Change "Homepage" in Group Type to "Documentation & Additional Project Info
Page", explain that it can be a local page or a remote one, and that it is NOT
the auto-created /projects/%PROJECT page (this last part in particular had
confused me all along)
* Change the "Homepage" link at top of Group (project) view to "Project
Docs/Info"
* Change left menu's "Server Admin Docs" to "Admin Options" and move it to
the first spot under "$sys_name Administration" in the left menu, since it
really admin options, not admin documentation at all
* Change the optional left menu "Local Server Admin Docs" to "Server Admin
Docs", and explain on the Group Type config page that this is where to put
documenation that you want to be available to server admins as "Server Admin
Docs" underneath "$sys_name Administration" in the left menu, and that
leaving it out will make this menu item not appear at all.
* Change "Get Support" under "$sys_name Help" in left menu to "%sys_name
Support".
This would:
a) remove any confusion between group "Main" page and what is presently
called group "Homepage"
b) put all the site admin functions under left-menu Administration
c) put nothing in left-menu Documentation that isn't actually documentation
d) clarify that what is presently called "Get Support" means "Get Support for
the local installation of the Savane tracking system, not the project at
hand"
e) clarify the documentation a little with regard to what these options
mean.
How's that? Is this a more useful kind of suggestion/issue report? If so,
please feel free to copy it to it's own "Feature Request" Savane Support
Tracker ticket (or I can do so, of course, if you want me to).
At any rate, my personal main concern at this point is the inability to turn
on the Bugs Tracker (in any project or project group) in my setup (Savane
1.1.0, Fedora Core 4, PHP 5, MySQL 4). It's awesome that twiddling two
variables in php.ini enabled the tasks/requests in the Trackers to be
editable. I'm suspecting there must be a similar PHP5-related problem
responsible for the fact that Bugs Tracker cannot be turned on even if Group
Type says it should be available. If there is any php.ini or other
suggestion you'd like me to test, I'll be quite happy to, as well as
reporting any logfile stuff you'd like to see. That should probably
contribute to a full understanding of how to get Savane running under PHP5.
It SEEMS like this shouldn't be too hard to figure out. What is different
about the the Bugs tracker compared to the Support and Task trackers? Those
two are working fine under PHP5. It's only the Bugs one (which I guess is
kind of ironic! >;-) So that's probably where the problem is, I would have
to guess.
PS: As for the sv_membersh question you asked:
> So now I think I picture your problem: you tried to login
> sv_membersh with a command that is not one of cvs/rsync/scp
> over ssh, didn't you? Well, the "restricted shell" quite
> concise comment in fact means that it is really a restricted
> shell, providing no more than what is mentioned in the
> config file.
I tried just sv_membersh by itself, and then tried 'sv_membersh cvs' and got
the same error (except that the second one mentioned cvs as the command that
wasn't allowed, and the first one had a blank in that part of the error
message of course). I did not try providing any commandline options to 'cvs'
after 'sv_membersh' if that is what you mean. I wasn't actually trying to do
anything functional with it, just seeing if it would do anything at all.
Like when I run 'cvs' from my regular shell, I get the "Usage:" message.
when I run 'sv_membersh cvs' I would expect to get the same thing, since
sv_membersh is told by membersh-conf.pl that 'cvs' is one of the very few
allowed commands. But I don't get the "Usage:" message from cvs, just a
sv_membersh error that I'm not allowed to run the command 'cvs'. Seemed kind
of weird.
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