Savane (software)

Savane is a free web-based software hosting system. It includes issue tracking (bugs, tasks, support, news and documentation), project member management by roles and individual account maintenance. This project is no longer developed.

History

The GNU Project's GNU Savannah website started out using SourceForge as its hosting software. However, after Savannah was set up, SourceForge was changed into proprietary software by its authors. Loic Dachary, main site's administrator at the Free Software Foundation, forked the software in order to maintain it.

This software fork was originally called simply Savannah, since it was the software running the GNU Project's Savannah website and had no other name.

Professor of Physics at the University of Porto Jaime E. Villate installed an instance of this software at CERN for the interest of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. From this point, CERN regularly hired GNU project contributor Mathieu Roy to work under the guidance of CERN developer Yves Perrin to improve the software so it would fit the needs to use it to coordinate software developments related to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. It was first released in February 2004 under the name Savane, the French word for "savannah", to distinguish the software from the two main instances GNU Savannah and CERN Savannah.

The latest main public release (3.0) was made in December 2006. Since then, the project failed to recruit new developers while Mathieu Roy and Yves Perrin lost interest in its development. Sylvain Beucler took the project over to ultimately decide, in 2013, to work on FusionForge, another fork of SourceForge, instead.

Features added in Savane

These features were added in Savane and were never implemented in most of other forks of SourceForge.

• Markup system for users to format text whenever it makes sense (for instance: Full markup in news item, Rich markup in comments, Basic markup in attached file comment, Links and items id references)
• Group Types configuration: on the same site, you can provide different sets of features to hosted groups ('group' is the word for 'project' in the savannah jargon) depending on their type, preconfigure features, allowing them to use the platform in different fashion.
• Support Request Tracking, Bug Tracking, Task Management, Cookbook (Documentation Management) and Patch Management with same codebase and therefore common interface to all trackers: -easy for users to get a grip on-, software easy to maintain and to improve. Includes:
  • Query Forms to filter items list
  • Multicolumn sort in items list with fields usage and values completely configurable by projects,
  • Dependencies between all items in the database (all trackers and all projects).
  • Transitions management allowing to enforce a specific workflow or to automate parts of the workflow
  • Mail Notification per categories in addition to usual mail notifications.
  • Posting Restrictions allows projects to restrict posting by users according to their level of authentication (members, logged-in users, anonymous users) for each of the tools.
  • Tracker Configuration Copy: project admins can easily duplicate the setup of the tracker from one of their project to another of their projects.
  • Duplicate post check mechanism.
  • Clever Mandatory Fields mechanism: accept the form and prompt for the missing fields.
  • Digests of items: display in one page a detailed list of items with the fields you selected
  • XML Exports that can be easily scheduled.
  • Users can Vote for items they think important.
  • Recipes (items in the Cookbook, the documentation tool) can be tied to specific context and users roles: if so, they will show up in the Related Recipes left menu entry.
• Included Anti-Spam Tools:
  • DNS blacklist configurable per site.
  • SpamAssassin Checks with Bayesian Filters, delaying post of anonymous users (or even logged-in but non project members users, configurable per site), avoiding potential spams to trigger mail notifications.
  • Content Spamscore allowing users to flag as spam what they think is spam, hiding content of items flagged as spam (but not deleted to prevent data loss in case of false positives).
  • Users Spamscore allowing site admins to easily ban spammers who created user accounts.
• PAM authentication: can optionally be activated to allow login via AFS, Kerberos, etc, in case you have such central server and users do not want to have a specific password for Savane.
• Site Admin administration:
  • Management of submitted projects via the task tracker.
  • Easy monitoring of users suspected to post spam.

Current or past installations

• CERN Savannah - provides the platform for issue tracking and workflow control for the software developments related to the LHC Computing Grid project, LHC being the Large Hadron Collider currently being built at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva
• GNU Savannah - provides the software development and issue tracking platform for GNU Projects, under the umbrella of the Free Software Fondation, but also to non-GNU projects
• Gna! - provides a software development and issue tracking platform to any Free Software that needs it, under the umbrella of the Free Software Fondation France.
• FZK Savannah - provides a software development and issue tracking platform for Interactive European Grid projects at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK).

References