Re: LuaForge is down and will be for some time

[M Joonas Pihlaja <jpihlaja@...>]

Hi lua-l,

Some of you may know that the Berlios hosting facility has had some 
issues lately.  The latest breakdown prompted the GPSd project to look 
for other hosting services, and in the process the lead dev wrote a 
really interesting email to the gpsd-users mailing list concerning 
project hosting providers which is relevant to LuaForge I think:

https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/gpsd-users/2009-October/004000.html

The short of it is: project hosting providers could make it easier to 
get at your own data.  As a tangential point, hosting providers like 
LuaForge could make it easier for third parties to mirror their data 
as well.

For example, as a part of the recovery of the GPSd project it turned 
out to be quite useful to have mirrors of the SVN repos, so in the end 
it only took a few days to splice the entire history of the project 
back together.  On the other end of the spectrum, freedesktop.org 
recently lost its entire set of user repositories and related on-web 
content due to a disk crash, and it looks like most of what was lost 
won't be coming back.

Back in the FTP days it was easy(ish) to set mirrors up, but now with 
the various *Forge-wiki-media-web-thingys it's not so obvious anymore.  
So for a future LuaForge it would be awesome if mirroring of it would 
be an easy thing to do.  I'm certain people would mirror it if it 
could be done easily.

Concerning the hub-of-links idea, I think this might work for 
LuaForge, but also want to remind that links on the internet are by 
nature pretty ephemeral.  As some sort of protection against the 
primary sites going down, it would be great if LuaForge-The-Hub would 
also provide for caching/mirroring of the actual downloadable goods in 
case upstream disappears (which it probably will in a link driven 
site.)  As a salient example, consider how often the mirroring of 
papers done by sites like citeseer is a lifesaver when the authors' 
sites go away.  Quite often citeseer is now the primary web source for 
some of these articles!

Best Regards,

Joonas