if the whole thing is generated from source files in CVS, so long as the actual source code is backed up, the web site CAN be recovered in a relatively painless fashion -- just restore the CVS backup and build the site. Am I missing something?
Consider the fact that not all of the project web sites are using the same
build tools. Consider, too, that sometimes you need a particular version,
or platform, to do a build due to bugs in a build tool. Add in the time
required to do the build, and any manual steps in the process. Scale that
to a couple of hundred projects. Those play a big part of why the
infrastructure team doesn't consider that a reasonable option. Basically,
if you don't do it in CVS, you're on your own. And that's not considered A
Good Thing. Another thing is that we can verify that a site hasn't been
tampered with by comparing it to the CVS.
Stefano has put forth a fairly detailed proposal for a build system.
Am hopelessly behind on the members, incubator & geronimo mail today so haven't spotted where Stefano raised this - I just thought I'd mention that at codehaus we've just started to use a 'build server' to auto-generate project websites (& builds) on a nightly basis which also doubles as a continuous integration build with nice nag email messages being sent if stuff barfs.
Its called DamageControl & is some pretty neat Ruby code if anyone's interested...
http://damagecontrol.codehaus.org/
(be gentle with it, its quite new)
it'd be cool to use something like this too then one day we can have daily binary distros as well (once we've figured out how we can do that through the [EMAIL PROTECTED])
James ------- http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/
