Re: More domain name confusion?

[Clark G. <cga...@vt...>]

This was going to be just a quick note about our 
"pre-production/production" web content design, but I started rummaging 
around through the archives and thought I'd go ahead a document the 
history for reference. Sorry for the lack of brevity. --ckg

The design for managing the web content is that the sourceforge site is 
considered "pre-production" which then gets to the "production" 
gnuplot.info site once/day. It was originally intended that the 
sourceforge project would be the primary site for gnuplot *development* 
(which I established 1 February 2000; HBB joined in April 2000). The 
idea was that we could work with the web site effectively on a 
"pre-prod" server (now this is sourceforge), which then is occasionally 
in a state of flux, and automatically this will get rolled into 
production once per day. There is a very small risk that the state of 
flux would happen at the moment of sync, and this is obviously a pretty 
cheesy design. However, it was a very easy way to give us a "poor man's 
CMS", and the content has never had a "must be updated in fifteen 
minutes because CNN is running a story that is going to give us $4M 
RIGHT NOW!" nature. More importantly, the only thing we must do to 
perform a major rewrite of the web site is to break the mirror while we 
work on it (or if we wanted to have a real "development" web site 
distinct from the public facing web site).

I think we may have had www.gnuplot.vt.edu canonical in February 1999 
(ftp was started in 1998), prior to the gnuplot.org domain. I picked up 
the content from Alex Woo in late 1998, and I think Lars ran the old 
cmpc1 ftp server. That was about when we started having this 
staging/production environment. I think Lars Hecking had the primary 
content shortly after we set up the gnuplot.org domain, and he operated 
until 2004 when we migrated web content to sourceforge. John Turner had 
the gnuplot.org domain between 1998 and 2001, when we lost it and I 
registered gnuplot.info, both of which have always been hosted at 
Virginia Tech. gnuplot.info came on the air 3 Jan 2002. In 2000, I 
created the sourceforge space to support gnuplot *development* (that's 
why the project is named "gnuplot development") and give us a CVS home. 
Mailing lists were migrated from Dartmouth to sourceforge in 2003. We 
started using sourceforge as our pre-production web site in late 2004, 
when Lars had to move off of his server at ucc.ie.

The suitability of the various options is arguable. Sourceforge tends to 
have a more "high availability" server environment (we "think" ....) 
Though there have certainly been plenty of issues with sourceforge over 
the last decade, this is much more true of a single server that some guy 
(i.e. me) takes care of (actually, the server has the support from a 
"team" of sysadmins, currently at the Virginia Tech Transportation 
Institute http://www.vtti.vt.edu/ ). VT is better connected to the 
research and international communities due to its involvement in 
Internet2 and National Lambda Rail, but this is from a strictly 
"performance" perspective not necessarily based on path redundancy, etc. 
So, from that perspective you could argue either way. It really is about 
having the ability for developers to work on the site without having to 
worry so much about breaking it temporarily.

Of course if we were to lose the VT hosting option someday I would not 
mind using sourceforge if necessary, though I would probably first look 
for something to replicate the existing design.

Anyway, I hope that explains why we have it set up this way and it makes 
sense.

--ckg


Philipp K. Janert wrote:
>> www.gnuplot.info should *always* be the canonical site!
>>     
>
> Sorry, but I'd like to challenge that.
>
> The master site is gnuplot.sourceforge.net.
>
> At least, that's where the master copies of
> all files live. It's also the site that the developer
> team has access to.
>
> I think it's great that somebody (Clark) has
> registered a more informative domain name
> (and pays for it). (Thanks, Clark!) But I don't 
> understand why that domain name is not either 
> an alias or a redirect to the SourceForge site.
>
> I think it is highly confusing that the site that
> *appears* to be canonical (at least by its 
> domain name) is in fact a merely *mirror*.
> (And it is confusing and not widely understood
> even by the developer team - as demonstrated 
> by the discussion a few weeks ago on this mailing
> list.)
>
> It's great that there is a mirror - in case 
> SourceForge is down or not accessible. 
> But it should be made clearer that it is 
> exactly that: a mirror. 
>
> I am also uncomfortable with the idea of 
> hosting the "canonical" site for a community
> project like gnuplot on a server that only the 
> owner has access to. (Single point of failure,
> all that.)
>
> What is wrong with having the "canonical"
> site be the SourceForge site? (I heard the
> argument that Virginia Tech has better 
> internet connectivity than SourceForge,
> but I find that hard to believe. And even if
> true, SourceForge's infrastructure seems
> at least sufficient.)
>
> I'd vote for making gnuplot.sourceforge.net
> be the "canonical" site (and have gnuplot.info
> point to it), and making Clark's site at VT the
> "official" mirror.
>
> Best,
>
> 		Ph.
>
>
>   
>> --ckg
>>
>>
>> --
>> Clark Gaylord
>> cga...@vt...
>>  ... thumbed on my treo ...
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Allin Cottrell <cot...@wf...>
>> Date: Sunday, Sep 20, 2009 8:03 pm
>> Subject: Re: More domain name confusion?
>> To: "Philipp K. Janert" <ja...@ie...>
>> CC: gnu...@li...
>>
>>     
>>> On Sun, 20 Sep 2009, Philipp K. Janert wrote:
>>>       
>>>> The domain
>>>>         
>>> 	www.gnuplot.vt.edu
>>> has been coming up among the top 10 links
>>> on Google for "gnuplot" for a few weeks now.
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Nothing there yet.
>>>>         
>>> No, and let's hope it goes away altogether Real Soon Now.
>>>
>>> Allin Cottrell
>>>
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>
>
>