Re: [Firebird-website] [Firebird-general] Re: Fb Website

[Pavel C. <pc...@ib...>]

Lester Caine napsal(a):
> 
> Why is backup complicated? cron job drops a copy of the database into
> a suitable directory, and rsync clones everything. It's been working
> fine for me for some time now. If the main server goes down, just
> point to the backup.

For "file copy" you would need to take the server down or use nbackup
(which we'll do only over my dead body), or we'll have to go with gbak.
I agree that it's not a rocket science, but it introduces additional
points of failure to the system. We're running the website from
relatively small VMWare virtual machine located at the other end of the
world (no webmaster resides on American continents), so if we could
avoid the database, then better for us poor admins. Tracker is enough
for us to handle in such setup, and we have no intention to "promote" so
far zero-maintenance website to this level.

> Advantage of having all the content in a database ... site search ...
>  potentially across wiki, news, blogs, forums and file galleries.

1. Site search could be actually faster from flat files than from
database if there isn't any full-text that could work with Firebird.

2. We don't need blogs, forums or extensive news on Firebird website.
There are other sites that do them all already. Firebird website is for
documentation, downloads, link "address book" to other resources and for
Firebird project members (developers, docwritters, QA etc.) to help them
do their work and to potentially attract new contributors. It's
definitely not a community site and shouldn't become one. It should be a
 display case for the project, static and tightly controlled.

3. As wiki goes, it doesn't necessarily needs a database as backend, and
we could probably use already existing one or use one provided by
SourceForge anyway, and soft-embed it into our site.

4. Using a database would force us to work with site content over the
web (or other) interface, which is unnecessary and in fact
counter-productive in our case.

> WHy would you not use Firebird .....

Database is a database, it doesn't matter which one. We use Firebird at
our tracker, and as painless it is, it's still just a necessary evil
(JIRA doesn't work without a database) that adds to administrator's
responsibilities. I already have a headache over tracker's much needed
upgrade (whole stack, OS, Java, Tomcat, JIRA, FB, with really nasty
requirements and dependencies), as we're far behind in our duty to keep
it current, patched and secured. The fact that it still works is a small
miracle. So until you're not willing to provide an administrator that
would commit her/himself to it's maintenance for foreseeable future, you
shouldn't propose any database, CMS or whatever fancy thing you might be
tempted to use. Any solution for our new website should have
zero-maintenance and nearly zero-complexity for backup/update/upgrade.
The fever "working" parts it would have, the better.

best regards
Pavel Cisar