From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA06080 for caml-redistribution; Wed, 3 Feb 1999 16:42:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA01831 for ; Tue, 2 Feb 1999 16:01:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from miss.wu-wien.ac.at (miss.wu-wien.ac.at [137.208.107.17]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA01559; Tue, 2 Feb 1999 16:01:43 +0100 (MET) Received: (from mottl@localhost) by miss.wu-wien.ac.at (8.9.0/8.9.0) id QAA03513; Tue, 2 Feb 1999 16:01:42 +0100 (MET) From: Markus Mottl Message-Id: <199902021501.QAA03513@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> Subject: Re: If i had a hammer... To: Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr (Xavier Leroy) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 16:01:42 +0100 (MET) Cc: caml-list@inria.fr (OCAML) In-Reply-To: <19990201144916.42120@pauillac.inria.fr> from "Xavier Leroy" at Feb 1, 99 02:49:16 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: weis > > I have followed this discussion with interest. Having some sort of > central archive of publically-available Caml tools and libraries > would be an excellent thing, both to connect developers and users, > and to coordinate future developments. > > I strongly encourage everyone who has written a piece of Caml code of > general interest to publish it on their web pages and announce it on > this mailing-list. > > It would be great to have a set of Web pages listing all such > announcements. We've been willing to do this for a long time, but > didn't quite find the time. We could try harder, of course; but if > there are any volunteers for maintaining such a list (or other > Web material for Caml), we'd be very happy to provide an account on > the caml.inria.fr server. (Please contact us directly at > caml-light@inria.fr.) I guess that also maintainance can be decentralized to some extend, though this raises security questions. I am not sure, how much "human ressources" you have for supervising such a site. But it should be possible to restrict "time consumption" of this task to things like "granting (write) access", etc... > We have plenty of old workstations that could be used for this > purpose, and indeed I've been thinking lately about providing > read-only CVS access to the OCaml development sources, as a simple way > to make available patches between releases. This would certainly be a great idea - this could speed up the development cycle due to smaller "feedback cycles" from users. > Setting up such a machine raises delicate security issues (our > machines have been attacked twice in the last three years), and even > more so if read-write access is provided for some users. Remote > developers would also need the ability to make .tar.gz distributions > of their sources available on our FTP server. This can also be done, > but raises further security issues. I see that this can be a problem. This strongly depends on the question, in how far you can seperate such a machine from your "production network" or any other security relevant facilities. > A more decentralized development model, where developers maintain > their own CVS archives and release on their own Web sites, would > certainly be easier to implement. We would still have a centralized > listing of available software on our Web site, and perhaps automatic > mirroring on our FTP server (and on the INRIA Rocquencourt CD-ROM). I am not sure whether this would work so easily. Here some reasons: * many users do not have superuser rights on servers that are accessible "around the clock". The actual administrators might (as in my case) be reluctant with introducing remote repositories. * Administrative maintainance of such repositories would multiply - I am sure the overall effort is smaller if there is one central repository. * Some developers might not be this familiar with setting up such services. * Contributors would have to contribute to different repositories on different servers, which might be a bit confusing - especially if some projects "fit into the same category". There are probably further arguments against this. I think it would be a very logical approach to have such a site somewhere at INRIA. Of course, any security questions would have to be solved first, but this certainly depends on facts only INRIA can influence... > Let's start to fill that Caml's hump! So that it may traverse the deserts of software engineering! Best regards, Markus Mottl -- Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl