[Coco] NitrOS-9 Wiki

[Tormod Volden]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 29 June 2014 04:37:33 Tormod Volden did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 1:19 AM, Greg Law wrote:
>> > Tormod Volden wrote:
>> >
>> > On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 4:22 AM, Greg Law wrote:
>> >>> I think it's time to move on from Sourceforge. I don't see anything
>> >>> other than downhill from here.
>> >>
>> >> True. Suggestions?
>> >
>> > I think the pain is finding a host that supports a Linux build
>> > environment that can be leveraged to build NitrOS-9 dynamically. At
>> > least I assume NitrOS-9 is being built directly on sourceforge. As
>> > much as I prefer Mercurial, there are lot more Git hosts than
>> > Mercurial hosts and the bulk of them do nothing more than host the
>> > repository.
>>
>> No, NitrOS-9 is not built on SourceForge. Some maintainer (lately it
>> has been me) builds locally and uploads a "nightly" build from time to
>> time. This is done by running a script so it is not much work. The
>> reason it is not done more often is that there are not often changes
>> to the code.
>>
>> There are some services that offer automated builds (launchpad.net,
>> build.opensuse.org) and although they are meant for building
>> distribution packages of software to be run on e.g Linux, it would be
>> possible to "abuse" them to build NitrOS-9 images as well. The images
>> would end up inside .deb or .rpm files though. Anyway, with the
>> current rate of the NitrOS-9 development and the numbers of people who
>> would use these images, I wouldn't go out of my way to make this work
>> automated.
>>
>> SourceForge is great, with shell access, bug trackers, an army of
>> engineers to keep wheels running etc, it is just that they change
>> things too often and too carelessly and there is a trend towards less
>> and poorer services.
>>
>> Tormod
>
> As has been noted on several other mailing lists. Linuxcnc has also been a
> victim of sourceforge, so often that about 5 years ago, Sherline, who
> makes small lathes and milling machines, is now supplying the servers for
> our wiki & web portals at their companies site. This includes an apt
> repository that allows us to use update-manager for new release
> distribution. Which for linuxcnc is several times a week because there is
> always new development going on.
>
> TBT, once setup, maintenance is minimal & the only expense is the power
> the machine consumes in a 24/7 uptime situation such as I do here,
> currently 72d+ since the last reboot.  Traffic to my site is a very small
> percentage of my use, so even if I was doing some advertising, I couldn't
> write off any significant portion as a business expense, currently paying
> about $40 for a 10 meg down, 2.5 up circuit from my local cable provider,
> which also supplies my landline phone.
>
> At my age, looking at 80 shortly, I don't think I should try & replace
> sourceforge as surely they will be here longer.  But someone in our coco
> world surely is young enough and linux savvy enough to undertake supplying
> the service AND the namecheap fees & bandwidth to do it. Perhaps an annual

One problem is that the "young enough" have little time to spend on
self hosting since they are usually in full employment, and if they
are CoCo/Dragon nuts, they have much more interesting stuff to do in
their free time.

> membership fee could be setup to cover catastrophic expenses, like a
> machine failure, which would represent close to $800 to replace this one,
> but if a dedicated machine was built just to do the server, that would not
> cost anywhere near that.  This is something that a $300 Atom powered box
> could do easily.  And its power consumption is under 100 watts too.
>
> Perhaps this could be discussed at the next "last" fest?

IMO just forget about self-hosting. Usually doesn't work so well over
time. I could give many examples but don't want to point out
individuals. It is not difficult to set up a web server, but keeping
all software up to date and fixing any problems /promptly/ over years
and years require dedication and continued interest which you cannot
easily expect from anyone.

Anyway, I think we are starting to discuss a non-problem. In this
case, for now at least, if we have some savvy people with the time and
competence to self-host and set up a MediaWiki, their time would be
more efficiently spent on just setting up our own MediaWiki on the
SourceForge project, problem solved. There is even a HOWTO for this.
It is just that we would like to avoid this kind of work and
SourceForge should have solved it for us or not created this issue in
the first place.

Everybody here should use their precious time on CoCo and NitrOS-9
development, not on web service hosting for which there are millions
out there who can do it better than us :) Of course, I am talking
about community projects now, there is nothing against people running
their own web servers for their personal toy projects and
experimentation.

Cheers,
Tormod