59 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
59 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
Subject: The Trove project -- next-generation Internet software archiving
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Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:21:13 GMT
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The Trove project is aimed at producing the next-generation Internet
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software archive facility. Its objective is to replace the ad-hoc
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hacks now used at Sunsite, CPAN, PSA, the Red Hat contrib directory
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and elsewhere with a flexible and powerful Web-accessible database
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that will, among other things, support unified searches across all
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Trove archives.
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As the person who does most of the package-filing work on Sunsite, I
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became convinced some months ago that the classical FTP-tree model of
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Internet software archive just doesn't cut it any more. It's way too
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intensive of maintainer time, making it unsustainable as Linux
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explodes in popularity. It also makes software excessively hard to
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find unless you're a regular archive user with a map of the site in
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your head.
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The thin WWW wrappers in place at Sunsite and CPAN make those archives
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a little prettier, but don't solve the underlying scaling problems.
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The Python guys over at PSA do a bit better on the user side through
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effective leveraging of free-text searching, but haven't solved the
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maintainer-intensiveness problem. And none of the ad-hoc archives
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talk to or can search each other.
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We need a fundamentally new approach, and we need it before these
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vital pieces of community infrastructure collapse under their own
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weight. I consider a solution to this problem critical enough that
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Trove is now my top priority after continuing the public push for
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the open-source development mode.
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The Trove project has been up and running for month or so. The design
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has firmed up nicely and working code is beginning to appear. If you
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think you might be interested in helping solve these problems, please
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look over the Trove project page at:
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<a
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href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove">http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove</a>
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There's a design document accessible in HTML there that describes the
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project's objectives and present status in detail.
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I'm aiming high. I want the maintainers of the major existing
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archives to buy in early, so that by year-end the present creaking
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infrastructure can be replaced with something better. I can deliver
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Sunsite myself. The Python community's leaders are already on board,
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and so is Red Hat. And we've had an expression of interest from
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CPAN's maintainer. Anybody else running an archive site is urged to
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join now so we can be sure to accomodate your community's needs in the
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design.
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We could use more design input (especially from people running archives now),
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and we'll need a fair bit of implementation and testing help. CGI and Web
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experts would be particularly welcome, also people who grok PGP and
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web-session-authentication problems.
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--
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Eric S. Raymond, http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr
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