Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Oct 19, Jason Flatt [jflatt AT sourcemage.org] wrote:
> Since there is quite a bit of discussion here and on IRC about this
> currently, I would like to take this opportunity to point out a couple of
> things.
> 
> First, no matter what software is chosen, there will always be the 
> potential 
> for something breaking and that aspect of the site being unavailable.  If 
> you 
> want as simple as possible with as little chance for breakage as possible, 
> then you need to go back to a straight HTML site, but then you lose the 
> advantages gained by using software.  Also, you would still need multiple 
> people available for updates, possibly more so, given the static nature of 
> a 
> straight HTML site.  Even MoinMoin has the possibility of breaking and 
> requiring someone with knowledge of it and/or Python to fix it.  How many 
> people do we have available who knows that software?

I'm not concerned about complexity, I'm concerned about redundancy.  We
need to have at least two people able to step into any significant piece of
software we utilize.  I know we have that with moin, bugzilla, etc. because
when we put them up it was multiple people working on them.  I don't think
we have that with Drupal.  People were willing to try to help with this
outage but that's where the complexity comes in, it's harder for someone to
walk in and pick up something big than something small.  If someone wants
to step up and offer to learn our installation and be a backup/second
primary then that would be great but so far no one has.  That puts us at
risk when it goes down and we can't reasonably ask the one resource we have
isn't in a place we can ask him to put everything else on hold to fix it.

I also don't think anyone can really claim that either the developers or
the users have embraced Drupal even after all this time.  There are some
parts of it that a few people like but we just don't seem to get a lot out
of it.  Maybe that would be true of any system, I don't know.  I just know
we need docs, if there's any way we can actually get people doing them.

> Second, I didn't say I was going away, I just said I thought I was too
> busy to be in charge of the Tome team.  I think my lack of activity for
> the past several months is a testament to that.  I don't have a problem
> staying on the team and helping where possible, both w/documentation and
> Web site maintenance.  I'm just not sure I should be the leader.  In
> retrospect, it seems that most (all?) of the leads have been less
> available than previously, so it may not matter if I stay as lead or not,
> but I'll leave that to the community.

Yeah I really doubt you need to step down due to lack of time considering
where everyone else is at.  Up to you really if you want to accept
nomination or not.  For at least now we definitely need your expertise on
maintaining the drupal site when you have time but again that's not
specified under the Tome role directly (docs!).

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