Subj : Future of ftsc.org web site
To : Alexey Vissarionov
From : andrew clarke
Date : Mon Feb 15 2021 04:37 pm
14 Feb 21 07:27, you wrote to me:
AV> These are primarily the git repositories. I'd be happy to use git for
AV> all our needs several years ago (when I was a member of the FTSC), but
AV> some old farts appeared unable to learn ever more simple things than git
AV> and gpg.
An old English phrase springs to mind: "You can't teach old dogs new tricks." :-)
AV> GitHub is distrusted (they are known to wipe whole projects due to
AV> politically "unreliable" people rarticipating there), so it could serve
AV> only as a mirror.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" - Voltaire
I have no issue with GitHub and the likelyhood of an FTSC repo being shut down by GitHub is essentially zero, and even if it's non-zero, the point of any repo is that its users have local copies, so it can always be restored one way or another.
AV> Anyway, to do that we have to start using git, so here's a question:
AV> out of all candidates, who is familiar with it?
Even if not, Git takes 10 minutes to learn if you're familar with CVS or Subversion. Obviously longer if you've never used revision control software before. But I'd like to think all the nominated FTSC members have at least some knowledge of what revision control is, but who knows around here. :-)
AV> Current ${subj} is a bit unfriendly to a search engines, but it's very
AV> friendly to mirroring software like wget. That's not what we could have
AV> with git, but it allows anyone to keep their own FTSC documents archive.
It's pretty rare anyone needs every document.
In any case "git clone xyz" will download them all, probably quicker than wget can mirror them, and you get a complete log of ever commit.
ac>> The Wikipedia entry for FidoNet could also point to both the
ac>> GitHub repo and archive.org snapshot, since they're fairly
ac>> relevant.
AV> Seems unwise. Keeping ftsc.org and adding some mirrors would be mush
AV> better.
So keep it, but the point I was getting at is that an FTSC repo should encourage feedback, bug reports etc. GitHub (and the other sites like it) give you all that for free.
ac>> Hosting all the FTSC documents on GitHub would be particularly
ac>> useful since it would allow anyone to write bug reports or file
ac>> "issues" relating to the various FidoNet standards documents, which
ac>> may help any future developers. (Or historians...)
AV> "FidoNet is our primary mode of communication" // (q)
AV> So all reports should go here, to the FTSC_PUBLIC echoarea. Also, git
AV> can work over a netmail...
The FTSC should not be in the business of restricting the discussion of its own documents to be within the bounds of FidoNet.
In any case FTSC_PUBLIC is awful for bug reports in comparison to something like GitHub.
Among other things, it:
- is not really public, or is essentially invisible to public without considerable effort
- has no archive
- has no search, so the same problems get asked
- has no way to resolve/close bug reports
- requires readers to skip non-technical posts (just like this one); particularly every single dreaded message about FTSC membership/nominations/voting/etc that are all nonsense to anyone only interested in actual technical work
Not directed at Alexey:
It used to be the technical discussions were in NET_DEV. I assume for some reason that echo died, not my connection to it. But the same questions got asked over and over there too, mostly because nobody kept a long-term record of anything except for the FTSC, who only ever published standards and never any annotations/addendums/clarifications.
Eg. a common thread was how to implement FTS-9 (MSGID/REPLY) properly since it was was so open to interpretation (and probably still is). (This is only an example, not an invitation to mansplain MSGID/REPLY to me.)
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