Box-Admins Team Report for May, 2007

The box-admins team is reponsible for seeing that the community shared
server is maintained and setting up any new features to be hosted on
that server.

For May 2007:

Göran Krampe discovered a temporary DOS attack on the server early in
the month and blocked it restoring proper response times from the
community server.

Also thanks to Göran we once again have a backup for the community
server.  Also Marcus Denker is providing a secondary backup and the
community server is going to be backing up files for squeaksource.com in
reciprocation.  Marcus and I are currently working out some final issues
but I'm sure we will be able to work this out in June and provide a
final report on this in the next installment.

Also you may notice that from the list of services below
www.squeakfoundation.org has been dropped.  After some difficulties and
discussions with the Board it was decided that at least for the time
being it makes more sense for the Foundation information to be part of
the Squeak.org site.  You can find this under
http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/

where more content should be appearing soon.

I want to thank the community for the monetary support needed to fund
the box and remind them that the bills continue to appear and that
you can currently contribute to the hosting bills by going to

http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/

and clicking on the 'donate' button at the top right.  Note that a
donation here may be used for other Squeak Foundation services including
but not limited to development, development infrastructure, and
promotion of Squeak.

The services being hosted have continued to grow and include (but are
not limited to):

http://www.squeak.org/

SqueakMap - http://map.squeak.org/

http://ftp.squeak.org/

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/

http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/

http://source.squeakfoundation.org/

http://map.squeak.org/

https://svn.squeak.org/

http://update.squeakfoundation.org/

http://wiki.squeak.org/

http://bugs.squeak.org/

and DNS services for squeak.org and squeakfoundation.org domain names.

Ken

On Wednesday 06 June 2007 8:01 pm, Ken Causey wrote:
> The services being hosted have continued to grow and include (but are
> not limited to):
>...
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/ 
..
> http://bugs.squeak.org/
Ken,

Thank you and your team for all the efforts you put into keeping the sites up.
It is really amazing that such a small team has been able to manage so many
sites and resources.

Before the web, programmers worked primarily with newsgroups/mailing lists and
used ftp sites for large files (and stuff like FAQs). Monthly and quarterly
updates about FAQ and new releases served to bring newbies upto speed. It
worked fine even for those of us who were not online all the time.

With Squeak, I see a lot of duplication in function between the lists and
mantis.  The community comes alive in squeak-dev and beginners mailing lists.
Bugs get discussed in mailing lists for confirmation before being posted to
mantis. Many tentative fixes get circulated outside of mantis. The bugs site
does organize reports, owners and patches by releases. It is much easier to
find the list of resolved issues on a per-release basis. On the other hand, I
saw 1 issue resolved for 3.8 and 12 issues resolved for 3.9. Given such small
numbers and the fact that the list is read much more than updated, the squeak
wiki/ftp site would have served as well.

Would consolidation help?

Just a suggestion .. Subbu

Hi all!

> The box-admins team is reponsible for seeing that the community shared
> server is maintained and setting up any new features to be hosted on
> that server.

I just want to say THANK YOU to Ken for his relentless efforts regarding
box administration. There is lots of work being performed silently here,
and relatively boring stuff too - just so all the rest of you know (and I
am not referring to my small contributions).

regards, Göran

You're right there is some duplication and overlap.  There are multiple
reasons for this I believe.  One of the biggest ones is simply
historical.  Up until a couple of years ago all bugs, fixes,
enhancements were posted to this list and that was the one and only way
to communicate them to the community.  Despite the time that has passed,
this habit has not been completely dropped.

Not everyone is happy with Mantis.  I certainly am not, but I'm somewhat
of a pragmatist and believe we have to use the tools we have while we
work on better ones.  For the moment I'm looking forward to Gjallar.

We can't force consolidation.  We can simply strongly suggest direction
for it and try to make the transition as easy as possible.  I think that
as the tools improve and we improve our own understanding of what we
need and what works best (and I personally think we still have a lot to
learn on that subject) I'm confident that consolidation on procedure
will improve.

Ken

On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 12:57 +0530, subbukk wrote: