First, apologises for asking possibly stupid questions - I've been
working with a special version of the backend for months :)
> > When I tested my Savannah 'merge' in my test install, I was surprised
> > to see that some CVS repositories and download areas were not created.
> >
> > After some head scratching ("where the hell did I introduce a bug!?"),
> > I saw that disabling an 'active feature' in the group-specific
> > settings not only stop displaying it in the Savane front-end, but also
> > prevent its creation in the backend.
> >
> > As far as I'm concerned, I though disabling an 'active feature' was
> > only a cosmetic change. Moreover, if I do so after the project
> > creation, it does not remove/disable the feature on the system.
>
> Sure. Because if code was written, we would not like to see it being
> erased by mistake.
>
> But I agree that we could improve the backend to even rename the
> directory created.
Or set the permissions :)
> > It is not a way for system administrator to perform per-project
> > configuration since these settings can be changed by the project
> > administrator - the system administrator would create a group type
> > instead.
> >
> > For example, I disabled the "homepage" in one of my projects because
> > the homepage was not ready for people to browse it. However, I did
> > wanted it to exist in the system so I could work on it.
> >
> > So, I suggest not to take these 'active features' into account when
> > creating the project facilities on the system. What do you think?
>
> Well, as I wrote the backend to specifically take into account the
> fact that features are activated or not, I would naturally be against
> :)
> And it was never written that active feature was purely cosmetics: if
> ou deactivate the bug tracker, you wont be able to use the bug tracker
> at all. If was you need is privacy, ask your project to be set to
> private (it happened once at Savannah, back in the old day, that a
> project was created and set to private for week).
>
> If someone feel his website is not ready yet, he can just put a
> front page mentioning that or an .htaccess.
>
> The whole point is avoiding creating useless stuff -- which may
> implies many other things. Having 20000 directories with 18000 being
> empty inside one directory is not the same as having 2000
> directories. Not for the system itself. Not for third party scripts
> that may run an rsync commadn on the directory. Not for the sysadmin
> looking for a specific directory with the ls command.
>
> Scalability will always be an issue. Creating only what is necessary
> is, IMHO, a good start.
I see the point, thanks.
Projects are created with features at 'On' by default which reduces
the efficiency of this way to do the job, but as you said this could
be improved, and the cron jobs still can check the database to see
what they should take into account.
Incidentally I would like to see more operations on the projects (like
rename, delete, propagate a group type change...) in the backend, but
I guess that's something we'll discuss later - there're other
priorities right now :)
--
Sylvain
