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3.5 Taking Advantage of Savannah

Every translation team should have a project in Savannah. There are some teams that use their own resources outside Savannah; although there’s no obligation to use Savannah for team work, the need for a Savannah project for each language is obvious: it’s a standard way to find information for translation teams and their contacts.

Using external hosting facilities may seem justified sometimes. Some teams may have already established repositories or bug tracking systems where usual contributors already have access. Some team members prefer to work within the established infrastructure of a broad translation team (for whatever reason), but this is discouraged. It is required that every team has a mailing list at Savannah (see Managing Mailing Lists), because it is easier to pass its management to the new co-ordinator when the old one steps down, and it helps to keep the archives at one place for future members of the team. Likewise, it is better to use Savannah for team’s repository and bugs/tasks.

However, it is important to remember that regardless of the technical resources which a team decides to use, the responsibility of the team co-ordinator remains the same.

Those teams that are using Savannah have a broad variety of tools at hand: team membership management, documents, trackers (bugs, tasks and support), alerts, CVS (and any other VCS that Savannah supports), home pages, etc. How each team uses these resources is up to the team itself, but it often turns out to choose Savannah for nearly all of the team activities, as it requires almost zero work; the Savannah Hackers are happy to support us.

Whatever you (in your capacity as a team leader) decide, please do it with caution: some organizational decisions may become ineffective as time goes by, and some may not scale well when the team grows. If the team is young and has a couple of members, it is better to refrain from such decision and discuss them with all the members when their number grows. Two or three people do not need a rocket platform or complex wizardry to do their work.

The next sections contain suggestions about how a team can use the facilities provided by Savannah. It is not mandatory to follow them, they are just suggestions.


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