Text 12004, 125 rader
Skriven 2021-02-15 19:42:00 av Alexey Vissarionov (2:5020/545)
  Kommentar till text 11997 av andrew clarke (3:633/267)
Ärende: Future of ftsc.org web site
===================================
Good ${greeting_time}, andrew!

15 Feb 2021 16:37:50, you wrote to me:

 AV>> These are primarily the git repositories. I'd be happy to use git
 AV>> for all our needs several years ago (when I was a member of the
 AV>> FTSC), but some old farts appeared unable to learn ever more simple
 AV>> things than git and gpg.
 ac> An old English phrase springs to mind: "You can't teach old dogs new
 ac> tricks." :-)

So these dogs should be barking somewhere away.

 AV>> GitHub is distrusted (they are known to wipe whole projects due to
 AV>> politically "unreliable" people rarticipating there), so it could
 AV>> serve only as a mirror.
 ac> "Perfect is the enemy of good" - Voltaire

"Nothing is perfect" (q) someone else

 ac> I have no issue with GitHub and the likelyhood of an FTSC repo being
 ac> shut down by GitHub is essentially zero, and even if it's non-zero,
 ac> the point of any repo is that its users have local copies, so it can
 ac> always be restored one way or another.

Personally I dislike the very idea of using some centralized service.

 AV>> Anyway, to do that we have to start using git, so here's a question:
 AV>> out of all candidates, who is familiar with it?
 ac> Even if not, Git takes 10 minutes to learn if you're familar with CVS
 ac> or Subversion. Obviously longer if you've never used revision control
 ac> software before.

Only for the most trivial tasks and personal use. Collaboration using git
appears to be a sort of art...

 ac> But I'd like to think all the nominated FTSC members have at least
 ac> some knowledge of what revision control is, but who knows around
 ac> here. :-)

I exactly know there are some who would very likely fail doing that.

 AV>> Current ${subj} is a bit unfriendly to a search engines, but it's
 AV>> very friendly to mirroring software like wget. That's not what we
 AV>> could have with git, but it allows anyone to keep their own FTSC
 AV>> documents archive.
 ac> It's pretty rare anyone needs every document.

Yes. But the storage space is cheap, so there's a good reason to mirror
everything.

 ac> In any case "git clone xyz" will download them all, probably quicker
 ac> than wget can mirror them,

No.

 ac> and you get a complete log of ever commit.

Yes, and this is the main advantage.

 ac>>> The Wikipedia entry for FidoNet could also point to both the
 ac>>> GitHub repo and archive.org snapshot, since they're fairly
 ac>>> relevant.
 AV>> Seems unwise. Keeping ftsc.org and adding some mirrors would be
 AV>> much better.
 ac> So keep it, but the point I was getting at is that an FTSC repo
 ac> should encourage feedback, bug reports etc. GitHub (and the other
 ac> sites like it) give you all that for free.

Feedback and bug reports could be published in the echoareas. Everything else
may be done with git itself.

Also, the use of GitHub creates a single point of failure (for example, they
would process "DMCA shutdown" requests, while I can safely trash this shit
exactly as I did before with hundreds of such requests). That means even if we
lose one of mirrors, there would remain other resources.

 ac>>> Hosting all the FTSC documents on GitHub would be particularly
 ac>>> useful since it would allow anyone to write bug reports or file
 ac>>> "issues" relating to the various FidoNet standards documents,
 ac>>> which may help any future developers. (Or historians...)
 AV>> "FidoNet is our primary mode of communication" // (q)
 AV>> So all reports should go here, to the FTSC_PUBLIC echoarea. Also,
 AV>> git can work over a netmail...
 ac> The FTSC should not be in the business of restricting the discussion
 ac> of its own documents to be within the bounds of FidoNet.

The "F" in "FTSC" stays for "Fidonet".

 ac> In any case FTSC_PUBLIC is awful for bug reports in comparison to
 ac> something like GitHub.

 ac> Among other things, it:
 ac> - is not really public, or is essentially invisible to public without
 ac> considerable effort

One message to areafix.

 ac> - has no archive

One more message to areafix.

 ac> - has no search, so the same problems get asked

That's the task of a message reading software.

 ac> - has no way to resolve/close bug reports

The FTSC doesn't develop anything, so here should be no bug reports. Even when
some documents may contain errors, they could be fixed without any bug tracking
facility.

 ac> - requires readers to skip non-technical posts (just like this one)

I see you're using Golded. Have you tried pressing the "/" key while reading
messages? :-)


--
Alexey V. Vissarionov aka Gremlin from Kremlin
gremlin.ru!gremlin; +vii-cmiii-ccxxix-lxxix-xlii

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