[Gambas-user] "New" gambas-basic.org website

[Christof Thalhofer]

Am 10.02.2018 um 12:50 schrieb Adrien Prokopowicz:

> We could find another hosting provider than GitLab so we don't have as 
> many things relying on them, but it only shifts the problem : we still 
> depend on a provider.

We could do that at Hostsharing, where we have the mailinglist. There's
plenty enough space free for a static Gambas website.

Hostsharing is a firm, that donates the webspace to the Gambas
community. It is a german cooperation (Coop) where I host my websites at
since 15 years. I am member of that coop. I asked the others, whether
they would like to donate to the Gambas community, and they did.

As easy as Benoît delegatet the subdomain "lists" to the HS-server he
could also do it with "www".

> The only real alternative would be to host it ourselves (or rather, 
> hosted by someone), but that has several downsides has well :
> 
> - We have to find someone nice enough to host and maintain the site at 
> their own cost (both in time and money). I know there are plenty of nice 
> people on this list, but I don't think many can afford both the monetary 
> and time (although I would love to be proved wrong here ;-) ).
> - If that person can't handle the hosting anymore (because life 
> happens), we're back to the same problem we had by choosing GitLab (or 
> even SF) : we will have to move again. If I remember correctly, this was 
> exactly the situation we were in with the old wiki (gambasdoc.org).
> - Personnally, I would pefer if this very nice person would spend its 
> free time contributing to the Gambas project or community, rather than 
> juggling with servers. :-)
> - If we end up not liking GitLab's service, we can just dump them (just 
> like we did with SF). It's harder to do that with a personally-donated 
> service.

If we generate a website with a static generator like Hugo the sources
can reside in Git and a switch to another provider or webspace is
child's play.

gambas-basic.org belongs to Benoît, he decides where the DNS delegates a
subdomain to.

> And there are still quite some technical requirements to have a service 
> on par with GitLab's : keeping the servers up-to-date (see Heartbleed, 
> Meltdown & Spectre …), handling the hardware, having a redundant 
> architecture with multiple servers (preferably on separate physical 
> locations), managing horizontal scalability, setting up a deployment 
> system for all the nodes, handling automatic failover and load-balancing 
> (preferably at the IP layer), having monitoring and alerts for the 
> administrator, and probably a whole bunch more…

At HS we habe servers runing on Debian, with physical failover (DRBD),
backupped to another data center in another town at night. The servers
are managed (and kept updated) by hostmasters. The Webspace is shared,
but of high quality, with SSH access. There can be a couple of users
with webspace and mailadresses.

> My point is : it's just as likely for a person to disappear as it is for 
> a service, but most likely the quality won't be the same. And 
> considering how little it would cost to change hosting providers (this 
> is litteraly just a repository to move and a domain config to edit), I 
> don't think it is worth the hassle of getting someone to support the 
> site. :-)
> 
> (Disclaimer : I spent two years at work wasting time struggling to get 
> servers running rather than doing actual development. I might be biased!)

You're right, thats a hell of a job, but we have admins to do that.

>> Can these pages been delivered as www.gambas-basic.org?
> 
> Yes, with GitLab Pages you can make any domain point to the pages (as 
> long as you can add a CNAME entry in the domain's configuration).

Ok.

>> It is already there :-) ... in the repo :-) ... in my repo :-)
> 
> Can you give me a link ? I searched for "Christof Thalhofer" on GitLab 
> but with no success …

No, the repo is on my computer ;-) that was a joke.

>>> I've noticed there is some code that is specific to Benoît's file
>>> system, so right now I'm working on making this code into a portable
>>> Static Site Generator (i.e. a script that anyone can run without issues,
>>> and which simply outputs the static files in a given directory).
>>
>> Like Hugo and such?
> 
> The principle is the same yes (source code => some process => static 
> files), but not nearly as sophisticated as any established generators 
> out there. I'm cleaning it up a little, but in the end it's just going 
> to be some simple template files being rendered to HTML (for every 
> supported language). :-)

On HS servers we could even get Gambas running. Mnogosearch which
provides the mailinglist search, runs there, it was compiled by me on
that webspace.

>> I recently found a password  in the sources ... !°"§$%-/
> 
> Which sources are you talking about ? I looked into the MakeWebSite 
> sources but I haven't found anything …

The Gambas sources. Some older version ... I forgot where it was ...
grep for password delivers too much

> If you meant in the main Gambas source, please email me its location 
> privately, I'll see if I can remove it from the Git history (without 
> breaking everything).

Ok. :-)


Alles Gute

Christof Thalhofer

-- 
Dies ist keine Signatur

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.gambas-basic.org/pipermail/user/attachments/20180210/52f61e2f/attachment.sig>