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  • From: Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Github as primary source repository for SourceMage?
  • Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 07:48:05 +0200

Am Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:20:52 -0500
schrieb David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>:

> Given a recent revival of interest in SourceMage, I brought up on IRC
> that we could move our primary repositories, wiki, and issue tracking to
> Github.

Apert from my instinctive reaction that tends to prefer self-hosting
just for the heck of it and the tendency to run into the other
direction when everyone is heading towards X (X being github nowadays),
I have to wonder ... WHY NOW? Shouldn't we get our code together and
produce a new stable release without rearranging our infrastructure?

I even don't really get what we had from the last website move. It's
not that much happened with the new one and it never really got into
shape. Finding information is a nightmare ... with bits of various wiki
generations popping up, and, well ... we all know what happens with
project management (issue tracker etc.) infrastructure if there is
nobody bothering to use it.

Anyhow: Is there a technical reason why we have to consider a move
_now_? Could we please discuss such stuff after having something like a
release? Or are we jumping on the bandwagon of folks who just put their
stuff onto github for everyone to get and don't bother with tagging any
version and providing tarballs? You know, the upstream vendors that
really make our life as Grimoire Gurus a pain.

> No decisions have been made at this point. Self-hosting is ancillary,
> cutting down on server costs would be a good thing.

That might be a point: Who is paying the SMGL server at the moment?
What kind of setup is it (redundancy, service, blah)? I admit that the
mirroring system is the last straw that keeps me from jumping off
sourceforge for a project of mine ... I am a bit afraid that my own
server could go down and service be broken. But then, my old server
went for many years without issue, and it wasn't even any kind of proper
server hardware.

Only since I got paranoid due to managing >100 machines at work, I
ordered a new private one with ECC RAM, at least some server-grade
hardware. This box I intend to keep offering as fallback server for
spell sources and I guess I could also put at least a mirror of our git
stuff on there. An extra GiB really is no issue on the >2 TiB disk
space I have there. Traffic is also rather relaxed, I get 10 TB on full
speed Gigabit per month, when that is exceeded the machine gets
throttled to 10 Mbit/s. If someone chips in 2 €, there's 1 TB more to
spend in gigabit. How much traffic is SMGL grimoire work? I guess a few
TB per month should handle it. It's not that we have many users.

But, well, I do get the point that a single point of failure is
not nice. But we could pool resources among servers we have and mirror
stuff, just won't have that fancy load balancing, I suppose. But where
is the load, anyway? And, heck ... what about the recent downtimes from
outfits like facebook and ebay? My own puny single webserver has a
better uptime than those for the past year;-)

Somehow it is strange that folks putting together their own GNU/Linux
are afraid of running their own server ... but well, OK, my webserver
is not SMGL anymore as something like debian is less headache to get
stable upgrades and I don't need the customization that is the selling
point of SMGL on a desktop.

I don't oppose moving to something like github per se (if it doesn't
suck ... and, well the usual thing about using free service from people
with commercial interestes, there has to be a catch). But, well, let's
do that discussion later after we revived something that is worth to
move anywhere.

Or, is there currently pressing need to get out of the hosting we have?


Alrighty then,

Thomas

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