Re: [9fans] Software preservation in the post-hg era

[Fazlul Shahriar <fshahriar@gmail.com>]

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It's worth highlighting the fact that Bitbucket will be deleting *all* hg
repositories on May 30, 2020. Thankfully, the Software Heritage (
https://www.softwareheritage.org/) seems to be doing a great job of
archiving all open source work. For example:
https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/directory/
I don't know how much they have archived or how up-to-date it is. It's
worth converting repos to git anyway, especially if we want to continue
maintaining them.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 9:11 PM Sean Hinchee <henesy.dev@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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