Hello Sylvain,

Thanks a lot for answering.

"- There are good, detailed explanations, that would help people scared by the terseness of existing doc :)"

Yes, I was one of those scared people, and the explanations are the ones I needed to understand what I was doing... I guess sometimes not being an expert can be useful for doc writing.

"- Something 'left out': pointers to documentation to do the non-Savane work, such as installing a CVS server."

You´re right, in fact, I think most of the problems in a savane installations come not from savane itself, but from misconfigurations of other services.

"- The user guide ought to document the field transition feature in the trackers. It is easy to miss it, while it can be quite useful :)"

I think I did mention it, although probably it is not clear enough. I am not really happy about the user guide. I had to write it quickly to have it ready for evaluation, but it needs work. I was planning to go back to it and give it a brush up after taking a little holiday, now that I have finally finished the degree :D

"- Sometimes, I'd rather read a more production-oriented approach, rather than 'how to make a test install', for example the SSL section that installs a dummy certificate."

Not being an expert (at all), I don't really feel up to writing a production-oriented doc. I focused on a test-install on purpose, because its more like a "how to play around with savane", which I do feel capable of writing.

"I'd love to have some details on the fact this was related to a school assignement. Were you allowed to involve other people in the process?"

The assignment was a "final degree project". Each student is supposed to design and set the objectives of their own project, having supervision from a tutor that makes sure the project definition is acceptable.

As part of my project, I proposed making it public, and trying to involve other people in it. The tutor accepted that, but required part of the work to be individual. So I had to work "in private" on the installation, and produce a first, individual version of the installation guide. Once that was done, I gave it to the tutor (every student has to give in a preliminary version of the project), and then started the "public" part of my project, using the savane-doc project at gna.

It would have been nice to discuss it more with the team, but I think there really wasn't enough time. By the time I had finished the "private part", the deadline was only 2-3 weeks away, and I had a pretty good idea of things I wanted to improve/complete on the install guide. Besides that, I had to work on the user guide, and produce the "project document" (introduction, objectives, methodology, conclusions)... So there wasn't much time left to discuss...

And yes, I do intend to do some more work on the documentation soon. As well as improving the user guide, I also wanted to translate the documents into Spanish. In a way, I'm looking forward to working on it without the pressure of having to give things in, and trying to get good grades.

Thanks again for the suggestions,
best regards,
Irene

A guide to user account and project configuration, giving an overview of savane functionality is available (http://download.gna.org/savane-doc/).

I don't know what you think of it, have I left important things out? do you think it could be useful? would it have been of help to you, Ralph?

Thanks a lot,
Irene

Indeed, such documentation could be valuable.

Hello:

I am currently studying a post-university degree on Free Software at the UOC (http://www.uoc.edu), a spanish virtual univiersity.

For my end of degree project, I am going to install savane and explore its functionality. At first, it seemed it was going to be a hard job (I am still pretty much a newbie), specially since I found no manual-type doc, but then that became the primary motivation: maybe my project could be useful, filling that hole. So I turned the objective of the project into writing some kind of manual which would include and organise all the info about savane I could find.

Ideally, it would include a section about installation and administration of a savane powered site; a section about functionality from the project administrator and developer point of view; and a last about functionality for all other kinds of users.

Don't know if I'm too ambitious, but anyway, I'll try and see where I get to. I was thinking of starting a savane documentation project at gna, which, if my local installation and configuration doesn´t go very well, would also serve me to look around and explore its functionality.

What do you think about all this?

"Web Architected
Access via a Web browser from any location at any time
No client-side installation, saving time and simplify maintenance"

Idem.

"Unified Role based Permissions and Security
Role / Group based access permissions on artifacts. Authentications for internal, external, off-shore and customized user accesses
Custom roles and groups"

Not sure about what they mean about "off-shore user accesses" but we have role / group access/posting permissions on trackers.

Groups are custom indeed; roles are more strictly defined (manager/technician/none).

" Fast Project setup
Users can reuse (inherit) existing template projects with users, roles, trackers, forums, when creating a new project
Customized template trackers i.e. Task, Bug, Requirements can be used to create new ones."

Idem via "tracker configuration copy" feature.

"Dashboard with real time reporting
Real Time Task Reporting with charts, Gantt chart
Real Time Bug Reports with charts
Source code quality and code changes reports with trends "

No charts.

"Software Configuration Management (SCM) Integration (change management)"

CVS integrated, CVS and SVN pending to be.
That said, we do not have commits associated with bugs.

Managed Subversion Repositories

"Managed repository support where CodeBeamer's roles and permission can be used to control access to local or remote repositories."

Idem.

"Issue Tracker with Change Approval Enforcement
Track Task, Bug, Feature request, Change request, and other issues
Change Approval Enforcement provides Project Managers with better control on changes of critical tasks, requirements and other artifacts where the change has impact on the project plan, on resources or on deliverables"

Not sure about what it means exactly. But such control can be achieved using Savane, making sure only manager got the "manager" status on the relevant tracker.

"Attachments, E-mail notification on changes "

Idem.

"Association with other artifacts / issues"

We have a dependancy system.

"Subscription, Search, History"

We have these (Cc copies, search, history).
Savane also also to digest items for clean printout.

"Custom fields, choice fields"

Idem.

"Fast navigation with Next/Previous buttons on Items"

We do not have these. Nobody ever asked such feature.

"Cut/Copy/Paste (Duplicate, Move) Issue Items between trackers and projects"

Savane allow reassignation of an item to another tracker/another project.

"Mass Edit"

Not sure of what it means.

"Default Values"

Indeed Savane allows to defines default values.

"Fine granulated role-based access permission"

We believe Savane role-based access permission is quite finely granulated too (anonymous user/authentified user/member/member technician/member manager/member manager & technician)

"Field level access permissions"

Not sure of what it means.

In issue tracker, some fields can only be changed by managers (priority, assigned to).

Items can also be set as private - and it is possible to configure which project members can see the item.

"Custom Reports
Custom reports allowing increased flexibility and automatic generation of release notes and other reports"

The item digest features permits this. We know several users, at CERN Savannah for instance, generate release notes this way.

"Source Code Browsing and Comprehension"

We believe that's not the job of Savane but of a third party software like cvsweb.

"Document Manager

Document Versioning
Document History
Access control Lock, Read, Write, Delete on document/role level
Document Attributes: index, description, category, status, history
E-mail notification on document Read/Write
Directory level notification subscription
Directory level read/write permissions"

To us, there's no strong reason to manage docs differently than source code.

"Comprehensive Search
On all data captured such as documents by indexes, forums, tracker, personal skills on project level or on all projects"

We have a search tool. That could improved.

"Discussion Forums
Different Forum templates for Announcements, News, Events and General discussion
Attachments, subscriptions, watch lists"

No templates.
We do not to reimplement a complete forum system.

"Contact list
See whether other users are online (logged in) and available"

We do not want to reimplement an instant messaging system.

"Inboxes (E-mail integration)"

We do not want to reomplement email system. But Savane generates automatically aliases for each user on the mail server.

"Integrations
Eclipse, WSAD; CodeBeamer provides Eclipse IDE with team collaboration features such as Task and Bug management inside the Eclipse IDE.
WebDAV Support
Wiki
MS Office Integration throughs WebDAV (named as web folder in MS Office). User can open/create/change CodeBeamer documents directly from MS Office.
MS Excel Export
E-mail clients
LDAP
SCM systems
Telelogic CM Synergy
Merant PVCS
Subversion
Microsoft SourceSafe
CVS"

None of these apart from subversion and CVS. We will not provide features that depends solely on proprietary software (but anyone needing it can implement it - because Savane is libre software).

"Bugzilla bug database import"

We do not have this.

"Platforms
Client: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla"

Most pages of Savane are w3c recommendations compliant. So every web browser understanding w3c rules should work. Such list is pointless.

"Servers platforms:
Windows 2000/NT/XP,
Linux: RedHat 7.1 and higher, SuSE 7.3 and higher
SUN SPARC Solaris 7, 8, 9
IBM eSeries/zLinux"

Savane depends on apache, mysql, PHP and Perl.
Any system providing these should work.

I assume that any software services company that have experience with these software can provide support for Savane - since Savane is free software.

"ISO-8859-1 character set support
UTF-8 character set support for Asian customers (Kanji, Traditional Chinese and Simple Chinese)"

ISO-8859-15 by default, UTF-8 ongoing.

Some feature we have not mentionned before:
- request for inclusion: users can ask to join a project, searching in the form the name/description of the project, adding an explanation message. A notification will be sent to projects admins and they'll decide on the matter. This feature is quite useful in Institutions like CERN where groups are created at meetings and where afterwards, people of the groups already decided at the meeting need to join the group on Savane - it helps the project leader that do not have to spend time to search for each user in the database.
- groups can be associated to groups type, that allows different configuration of default setups and restrictions for groups.
- many links in the project menu can be configured, if the site admin allows it, via the group type configuration.
- with the issue trackers, mail notification can be item category specific
- there is a news system where anybody can submit an item ; the item get pending until a news manager of the project approve it
- project registrations are managed via the task tracker
- trackers automatic fields update: you can configure a field to be updated automatically if another field reach a specific value. As example, you can configure your support tracker to set an item to private if the severity field is set to "security". And this can trigger assignation of the item to a specific technician and send notifications to a specific list.
- in "My Incoming Items" section (not included in release 1.0.5, will be in 1.0.6), any user can see news that should be of matter to him (news posted on projects he is member of; new and unassigned items posted on tracker he is manager of; items newly assigned to him by someone else)
- in "My Items", any user can get an overview of his items (submitted by and assigned to), mentionning the item status. He can defines the priority threshold of items to show
- it is possible to "watch parner activities": useful to do QA, it allows someone to get any notification sent to another member of his project.
- user session management: users can check (and even remove) open session with their account.
- color theme: Savane comes with more than 10 color themes. While companies/institution usually want to create they own color theme/design (Savane use CSS extensively, it gives many possibilities), it proved to be useful in several places to provide different theme, simply because you'll never be able to have color theme that everybody truly enjoy.
- user notifications: any user can configure in which case he wants to be notified ; any can configure the subject line of mail notifications he receives

There are a few things apart from that. And one important thing, Savane is libre software. You can pay whatever (competent - apache, mysql, PHP and perl, it should not be very hard to find people with such knowledge) company to get support for it. You are 100% you will not end up blocked because the editor do not to implement what you need. You can benefit from improvements made by others and get your improvements integrated upstream.

Savane was chosen by the CERN LCG App several years ago. People there seems quite satisfied.

Savane is not very easy to install. But quicker and easier to set up than bugzilla.

I'm a sorry but I had things to do. And, unfortunately, when I devote time to Savane, I tend to do code that will make direct improvement for users, since I feel we need it (for instance yesterday I almost rewrote "My Items" sections since this page was completely unusable for me - to many items, not ordered in a logical enough way, no way of sorting data).

Vincent Caron: "I don't know, maybe that's your job actually?" -- how's that? Do you really think that it is the potential user's job -- to find out the main features of the program, the most revealing demos, the best ways to use the program? It seems to me that in ideal world it would be the author who knows all these points better than anyone. Don't you think?

Of course, given all this information, the user must make his mind, do some comparison to choose what is the best for him.

> Note: CERN has a Savane-based server, could be useful to boast
> about it.

I have. And they answer "Yes, very good, but what does it actually do?"

I have also already read some READMEs.

http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/checkout/savane/savane/README and http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/checkout/savane/savane/REQUIREMENTS answer some of the "how" questions, but few of the "what".

The best clues to some specific functionality seem to be in http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/checkout/savane/savane/backend/README

http://cvs.gna.org/viewcvs/checkout/savane/savane/doc/presentations/README is funny because it shows you know there is a need for the sort of documentation that you, Vincent, now deride as "marketspeak".

Try and be more positive. If Mathieu does invest in the technical summary document I requested, maybe you win another x users of whom y might contribute to the further development and z might help with the documentation. This helps win another m users ... and you take over the world. :-)

> I'll try to devote time to do this this week, if I can.

That will be wonderful. Thank you.

Mathieu,

I appreciate and admire what you've all achieved with Savane. I'm familiar with the history with Sourceforge. I know there's been no business plan - just a collective itch to be scratched. You've made something good. I'm sure of it. I just don't know exactly what it is. :-)

Now, I'm not seeking to exploit you or your work - I work at a scientific institute not a commercial business. But I still have to have some ammunition to pursuade my colleagues to try out Savane.

How much effort would a summary document need? I guessed earlier, half a day? Do you disagree? That effort doesn't need a business or a foundation to back it, does it? :-)

Best regards, Ralph.

> Well, you can get an overview of the interface looking on a
> running installation like here, at gna.

So, you are saying "suck it and see". You know that this is not really good enough, don't you?

You can't expect potential users to spend some indefinite time playing with your demo/guest interfaces to come up with their own list of features. How do you know they will have the patience or luck to find all the functions? Will they see any or all the owner or admin features? What if they misinterpret what they think they've found? How are they supposed to see the interactions and interconnections (if any) between the various users and subsystems?

How am I supposed to convince my colleagues to invest time and effort trying this thing out if I don't have any concrete list of features to show them? If I don't have any idea of the underlying architecture? If I don't know what it does?

Come on guys. If I know open source projects, the information is there in a load of different README.TXTs, in mailling list archives, in old emails. Please, spend half a day to put some summary doc together. Put it on the homepage. Give me a chance. Please.

(Now there's a joke: If I click on the link to your name, Mathieu, I get a mailform that starts "If you are writing for help, did you read the project documentation first?" Pah!)

Best regards, Ralph.

Where do I find some description of what Savane is? How it works? What features it has? I can find nothing beyond the description on the front page:

"Savane is a Web-based Libre Software hosting system. It currently includes issue tracking (bugs, task, support), project and member management, mailing lists, and individual account maintenance. It is internationalised and themable. It depends on Perl, PHP and MySQL."

... which is not really enough to convince my colleagues that we should adopt it. I'm sure there must be something beyond "suck it and see".