taskSavannah Administration - Tasks: task #14370, Submission of melikamp's userland

 
 

task #14370: Submission of melikamp's userland

Submitter:  melikamp <melikamp>
Submitted:  Sun 12 Feb 2017 05:39:59 AM UTC
   
 
Should Start On:  Sun 12 Feb 2017 12:00:00 AM UTC Should be Finished on:  Wed 22 Feb 2017 12:00:00 AM UTC
Category:  Project Approval Priority:  * 5 - Normal
Status:  Cancelled Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  ineiev Open/Closed:  Closed
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Sat 04 Mar 2017 08:23:57 AM UTC, comment #10: 

Thank you, cancelling.

Ineiev <ineiev>
Site Administrator
Fri 03 Mar 2017 07:02:02 AM UTC, comment #9: 

I got the info I requested, and now I finally understand what's going on :) Feel free to close this ticket. I will not mind if you approve it, but if I knew in advance the acceptance policy details here at Savannah, then I would not have attempted to submit this or any other of my projects.

Please forgive me if anything I said in this thread was unnecessarily unpleasant or mean. As a hacker, I hope you understand the gravity of passing a subjective judgement on other people's code, and letting it weigh on a formal review process. If I may give you just one advice, please make sure you make it very clear to the next obstinate submitter that in making a subjective judgement call, your are following an established Savannah project policy; and if you also want to be polite, ask the coder whether they want to hear your personal opinions before you share them.

melikamp <melikamp>
Mon 27 Feb 2017 08:41:06 AM UTC, comment #8: 


...creative control...


I don't perceive this case as a matter of control. Savannah either accepts the package or rejects it.


...censoring...


Censorship means that certain third party forbids publishers post some materials by an author.  In our case, there is no third party.


...objective criteria...


I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g. simplistic package.  We have to use our judgement.


Is there any chance to have any other member of the Savannah project to weigh in on this conversation?


I raised the issue on our mailing list, but so far no response has followed.  Other people are busy or trust me.

Ineiev <ineiev>
Site Administrator
Fri 24 Feb 2017 07:27:33 PM UTC, comment #7: 

Since I haven't heard from you in a while, I just wanted to touch bases and perhaps clarify some of my concerns.

I want to make it very clear, once more, that I do not suspect at the moment that I was treated badly or unfairly in any way, nor do I presume (and never have) that my project qualifies for being hosted at Savannah.

I would also like to make it very clear that I am the project leader for this project, and it was never my intention to share the creative control with the Savannah project. In particular, I have no intention to fuse my project to the GNU software project. And while I would be wide open to sharing the creative control with any or all Savannah hackers, I would never want it to be traded for hosting services in any way.

This, I believe, is the very root of the misunderstanding we are having here. I came to Savannah project assuming that its non-GNU part is a "hosting project", and I will define this notion for the purposes of this discussion. Indeed, I have no one but myself to blame in the event that this assumption is now backfiring on me, but I would appreciate if Savannah project provided a clarification and set me straight on this single issue.

By "hosting project" I mean precisely my standing assumption that Savannah project does not filter/censor/reject projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah hackers). It is very clear to me that Savannah project rejects non-free software, and I am OK with that, because I believe it's an objective and fair criterion, applied uniformly to all submissions. Indeed, the only reason I chose Savannah over, say GitLab, is to show my support for Savannah's commitment to dump non-free software. And in fact, I would be generally willing to modify my project in a wide variety of ways in order to meet all kinds of objective tests, as long as they are applied fairly and uniformly, and I listed some examples of what I think of as fair and objective criteria in my previous post.

Of course, it is entirely within Savannah's right to demand a share of creative control for any project hosted, even if that demand based on nothing more than the subjective opinion of a Savannah hacker. But that, I figured, would essentially make Savannah a software project with its own unique subjective vision of what constitutes acceptable Savannah software. There is absolutely nothing wrong with such a direction: this is indeed what GNU software project currently is, but in that case I would appreciate if Savannah project could confirm as much.

So please forgive me if anything I said up to now sounded like an accusation, or gave you an impression of ill will; that was certainly not my angle. All I want to know at this point is a clarification to what I regard as a very simple and straightforward question, which allows for a very simple and straightforward yes/no/no-opinion answer:

Does or does not Savannah project demand, allow, or abide by filtering/censoring/rejecting projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah hackers)? I totally understand if the project cannot give me a yes/no answer due to the fact that this question never came up before; I would not be surprised if the reason for me waiting here is the ongoing internal discussion intended to settle this very question. In that case, I would appreciate a bit of feedback which confirms as much.

At any rate, thanks for your time, and I hope we can resolve this issue soon and to everyone's content :)

melikamp <melikamp>
Mon 20 Feb 2017 07:44:55 PM UTC, comment #6: 

There seems to be a miscommunication of some sort. Is there any chance to have any other member of the Savannah project to weigh in on this conversation?

Here's my take on the conversation so far.

The very first thing you asserted was that the program does not seem to be generally useful. As an author, I would be delighted to discuss the program's usefulness with you, but with two reservations.

First, I wanted to make sure that demonstrating the program's general usefulness is a requirement for approval. So I posed a this very direct question to you, but you chose not to give me a straightforward answer along the lines of yes or no. By now, however, seeing how this usefulness issue keeps coming up, and the process is at a standstill, I realize that it is a requirement for approval.

Second, before I spend even a second of my time to discuss the general usefulness of the program, I would like to be reasonably assured that there exists an objective test for that, and this test is applied by the Savannah project in a fair manner to all submissions, and I am not singled out for some reason. So my very next question was whether such a test was applied to my project.

For example, rejecting projects smaller than 1000 bytes in size would be an objective test; or rejecting projects larger than 100 GiB; or rejecting projects with certain frequency of syntax errors per bytes of code; or rejecting projects which fail an evaluation by an impartial and blind committee of recognized experts in the field, although this last scenario is borderline with respect to both objectivity and fairness.

With your last reply, you declined to provide a description of any such test, asserting instead that you deem certain parts of the program unacceptable based entirely on your personal opinion about its general usefulness.

I totally respect your right to have an opinion on how generally useful my project is, as well as your right to share this opinion in public. However, I don't see how this opinion can be appropriate within this specific discussion.

In your last reply you pointed out specific code fragments which, in your opinion, are problematic, and make the project unacceptable. You clearly indicated that the acceptance of the project depends on my willingness to modify the algorithm. For just one example, when you point out the reliance "on specific paths where packages are installed" as a reason for disqualification, you tacitly assert that the behavior of this code would have to be changed. You also started out by saying that this is your opinion.

If what you have done so far had a malicious intent behind it, other by you or by the project as a whole, it would be called extortion. Assuming ill intent, with your last post you unequivocally attempted to extort a share of creative control over the project in exchange for approval. You clearly indicated that the approval is not happening because the code (specifically, its algorithm) would have to be altered in accordance with your personal opinion about what makes a program generally useful.

I am thoroughly convinced at this point in time that there was no ill intent here, and I am treating this whole thing as a result of miscommunication.

At the same time, I would also be completely satisfied if you told me that the Savannah project has the official policy whereas they reserve the right to censor free software projects which fail subjective usefulness tests. I totally respect the right of any project to demand a share of creative control over the submissions, I guess I just didn't expect a hosting project would do it.

I hope you can see why I think we need to get a fresh pair of eyes on this issue, and I am especially anxious to find out whether the Savannah project considers it's OK to reject submissions in a manner described in the previous paragraph.

melikamp <melikamp>
Mon 20 Feb 2017 07:37:09 AM UTC, comment #5: 

Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours.

alt avconvert exif-date
dual-screen external-only flac2mp3 hdmi-vga-off hplayer
lo lsvg lt make-thumbs minetest play-random qu random-tunes
restart-stuff rmtmp rotate-bg sfind snooze tor tube xo xoa ymd
are basically invocations composed for specific user preferences.

dual-screen external-only hdmi-vga-off hplayer
imply a specific hardware configuration.

empty open-address-book open-cookie-jar random-tunes
rely on a specific home directory layout that doesn't comply
with conventions for generally used packages.

lo minetest qu tor tube xo xoa
rely on specific paths where packages are installed.

All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. They are just not written with such use in mind.

Ineiev <ineiev>
Site Administrator
Sat 18 Feb 2017 07:30:28 PM UTC, comment #4: 

To be sure, I never claimed these are my "personal files". This seems entirely your opinion. I am afraid I do not understand how you came to the conclusion this project could not "be generally useful". In particular, I cannot understand how you could figure out that it is not used by multiple parties right now, and that it will not be even more useful in the future.

Did you use an objective criterion to determine that these are my "personal files" and that this project could not "be generally useful"? If so, what was that criterion?

melikamp <melikamp>
Sat 18 Feb 2017 07:07:47 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Savannah isn't meant to host personal files; other hosting services offer this.

Ineiev <ineiev>
Site Administrator
Sat 18 Feb 2017 06:00:19 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Is general usefulness a requirement for approval?

melikamp <melikamp>
Sat 18 Feb 2017 05:48:00 AM UTC, comment #1: 

These are person-specific scripts (e.g. in my distribution, minetest binary is installed in /usr/games rather than /opt/bin; open-address-book works with /home/melikamp/documents/...).

It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful.

Ineiev <ineiev>
Site Administrator
Sun 12 Feb 2017 05:39:59 AM UTC, original submission:  

A new project has been registered at Savannah
This project account will remain inactive until a site admin approves or discards the registration.


Registration Administration


While this item will be useful to track the registration process, approving or discarding the registration must be done using the specific Group Administration page, accessible only to site administrators, effectively logged as site administrators (superuser):



Registration Details


  • Name: melikamp's userland
  • System Name:  ulmel
  • Type: non-GNU software and documentation
  • License: GNU General Public License v2 or later





Description:

a set of bash scripts automating many daily tasks, such as opening files, processing files, backup, etc.


Other Software Required:

GNU userland


Tarball URL:

https://savannah.gnu.org/submissions_uploads/m-userland.tar.gz


melikamp <melikamp>

 

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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2017-03-04 ineiev StatusIn Progress Cancelled
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2017-02-18 ineiev StatusNone In Progress
        Assigned toNone ineiev

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