Hi Max (et al),

On Sun, Jan  4, 2026 at 22:42 (-0700), Max Chernoff via ntg-context wrote:

> Hi Jim,

> On Sun, 2026-01-04 at 21:23 -0400, Jim wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan  4, 2026 at 17:30 (-0700), Max Chernoff via ntg-context wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2026-01-04 at 10:59 -0400, Jim wrote:

> tug.org used to be hosted in the US (a decade+ ago),

I guess I'm living in the past.  ;-)


>> One thing that just occurred to me... if the mirroring only happens in one
>> direction, it wouldn't be good if people (absent-mindedly) updated a copy
>> of the wiki when they really wanted to update the original, so I wonder how
>> easy it would be for the mirrors to disallow the editing feature.

> Probably the easiest solution would be to just have a fully-static site
> that's automatically updated once a week or so by using something like
> this

> https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner

That sounds reasonable to me.  Precluding the alternative choice (below),
as long as it inhibits enthusiastic contributors from wasting their time
making updates to wiki pages, where the updates will disappear, that should
be good.

>> Alternatively, in principle updates could propagate from mirrors back to
>> the original, but my gut tells me that opens up huge admin issues.  (My gut
>> is occasionally wrong (location of tug.org is a case in point), but even
>> with my recent rash assumption, I'm doubling down and believing my gut
>> again.)

> I think that the only options to allow writes anywhere are for all the
> systems to use the same database (bringing us back to a single point of
> failure),

Not good.

> to allow writes to different mirrors to get out of sync (which seems like
> a terrible idea),

Agreed.

> or to set up some complex clustering/sharding scheme (which sounds much
> too complicated).

That was what my gut was telling me.

Mind you, not having looked around, the possibility that someone had
already created some all-singing, all-dancing software for exactly this
situation did occur to me.

> So I think that having the mirrors be read-only is the only feasible
> solution, which is probably for the best, since I'd personally much
> rather just host a bunch of static pages than to run a database and a
> bunch of other software.

I'm certainly happy with this.

Next steps?  Who should give blessing (or positive assent or ...) to this?
(Hans?  Taco?  Wolfgang?  ...?)

While it is nice of Hraben to volunteer his server, since (AFAIK) TUG is
slightly more well known than Hraben, perhaps hosting the mirror on TUG
would provide ConTeXt with a bit more (well-deserved) visibility.  (Would
it be egregiously redundant to have two mirrors?  If not, why not?)

Cheers.

                                Jim

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