Re: More domain name confusion?

[Philipp K. J. <ja...@ie...>]

Clark - thanks for the write-up. This is great.
I think others on the mailing list and the dev 
team will also appreciate to have this review.
(I'll also put it on sourceforge as a Readme
file for the web setup.)

That being said: needs and demands change,
and it might make sense to review the current
setup occasionally. It seems to me that much 
of the current setup (I am trying to avoid the word
"architecture") is a relic of the days when all the 
open-source infrastructure (like SourceForge
itself) that we have today did not exist.

Here are my issues with the current situation.
- It is opaque. A few months ago, people on
	the core dev team could not describe
	the website situation to me.
- It is potentially confusing to users. At the
	very least, it should be clearly stated
	(for instance in the FAQ) that the 
	gnuplot.info site is a mirror of the
	sourceforge site.
- The sourceforge site is accessible to the
	dev team, but the domain name and
	the mirror site are only accessible to
	Clark. What happens if something 
	happens to him, or if he is busy or 
	unreachable? 

Lastly, I am not sure that we need the distinct
staging/production environments. We seem to
be updating the website very rarely. Additionally,
these days everybody has access to a webserver
of their own which can be used for staging, testing,
development. (This is one of the ways in which 
today's situation is very different from the way 
things were ten years ago.)

Given that today there is SourceForge, the need 
to host community projects on individual's accounts
seems less pressing. As I said before, it would make
sense to me to have gnuplot.sourceforge.net be the 
"canonical" site (and have gnuplot.info point to it), 
and to make Clark's site at VT a clearly designated 
mirror.

Votes? Opinions? Discussion?

Best,

		Ph.


On Monday 21 September 2009 03:29:34 pm Clark Gaylord wrote:
> 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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