[ On Saturday, May 1, 1999 at 03:07:50 (-0400), Charles M. Hannum wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVSup collectings for a NetBSD CVS tree
>
> I don't understand why you folks are arguing about this with such
> fervor!

Well, just in case I've not been abundantly clear on this point yet...  ;-)

I find it particularly astounding that there would be members of the
NetBSD community suggesting that a piece of specialized software be
rejected by the community as a whole just because it's not 100% portable
to all supported NetBSD platforms, and particularly from members who's
sole existance in the NetBSD community depends on the rest of the
community's openness and willingness to accept odd-ball and one-off
systems in to the fray and not tell them that they're so marginal they
should just switch to something more popular.  In my experience it's
rare to see such two-faced attitudes in an otherwise co-operative free
software community.

Oddly enough in this case we're talking about a piece of software that
with only reasonably minimal effort will work on 12 out of 15 officially
supported platforms (and already works on what I would suggest are two,
or maybe even four if you include binary compaibility, of the most
popular platforms).

> (I would not normally propose that someone use their own hardware for
> this, but in this case Greg has already stated quite vehemently that
> he will do so anyway.)

Unfortunately if I use my own available hardware then the resulting
system is unlikely to be able to support public access.  (All I have
available at the moment are a Sparc-1 and a DEC Multia, both rather less
than well endowed and though suitable for personal use, would not be
capable of supporting anything more than a very limited number of other
users.)

It's also unlikely that the locally available free co-location service
I'm thinking of will permit any significant public bandwidth usage
without requiring me to pay for it.

I.e. it'll be impossible to ever meet the conditions you've set out for
promoting the server to being cvsup.netbsd.org.

That's why I said:

    What I need from The NetBSD Foundation is some form of support,
    primarily in the form of approval and in promotion and facilitation
    to get server hardware and possibly co-location services donated and
    installed.  Then, if a machine is donated I've offered to help set
    up a public CVSup server on it and to help maintain it.  Of course
    if anyone beats me to it I won't feel put out by it!  ;-)

Such "promotion and facilitation" need not be very labour intensive.
Simply putting a notice on the web page and posting an official request
to the "announce" lists and groups would get the ball rolling.  Someone
in the know would also have to decide if there's sufficient capacity to
co-locate a CVSup server with the existing FTP server.  Once hardware
and co-location facilities are found then another posting to help find
on-site volunteers to actually install the hardware and make it
available to me remotely would be necessary.  Once the server is up and
running and has been tested then final approval needs to be given so
that the person responsible for maintaining the NetBSD.ORG zone could
add the appropriate DNS records for CVSup.NetBSD.ORG.  Unless someone
feels it necessary to get formal with paperwork and red tape then I
think that should be about the extent of the effort required directly
from TNF folks.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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