In the wake of Bitbucket removing hg (Mercurial) support [1], I feel it's topical to bring up software preservation for the plan9 community.
A lot of community contributed software has been put up on Bitbucket or other hg hosts over time (RIP Google Code), but no consolidated effort, to my knowledge, seems to have been made to index, let alone mirror, this software. For now, as a stop-gap, I've made a GitHub organization in which I've consolidated most of what I had indexed from Bitbucket and a few other places. Thanks to people like Ori Bernstein, we have a native git client for plan9 [3]; without a native client, this kind of transition wouldn't be nearly as simple, thank you. I'm more than happy to add anyone interested in the curation of this archive to the GitHub organization. It would be nice to have spare hands around to add README's, mkfiles, and attributions where they have been missed or never existed. In the long term, it would be nice to have a federated or otherwise decentralized solution to pooling community contributed software, especially keeping in mind ease of mirroring and picking up old projects as contributors come and go. The contrib/ directory on sources and 9front are fine and good, but they are centralized. I don't have a proposed solution to this problem, but it would be nice to have ideas or insight posted ☺. I recognize that GitHub is also centralized and doesn't solve the centralization problem, but at least git is really straightforward to mirror with multiple remotes, etc. and having an index/archive is valuable at least to me. If anyone has further thoughts, anything they want added, or any lists or indices of works they want archived/mirrored, I would love to see these posted. If anyone wants to mirror the archive, that would be wonderful. I was considering mirroring everything to a remote in sr.ht in the future, but haven't gotten around to it. As a footnote, there's a decent git client written in Go that works alright on plan9 [4], but it's slow and memory intensive at the moment. Cheers, Sean [1] https://twitter.com/traverser/status/1244398479591563265 [2] https://github.com/Plan9-Archive [3] https://github.com/oridb/git9 [4] https://github.com/driusan/dgit ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T303744e1ec6d2108-Ma1c49d00e7042a1a8f6713d2 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription