I don't know if he's on here, but Al Kossow (aek at bitsavers dot org), the
Software Curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA
(SillyCon Valley, just down the road from the Googleplex) might be
interested in this, if he isn't already aware of what's going on.  He's an
expert on The Good Fight Against Bit-Rot and has tools for preserving
pretty much everything in Original Flavor media formats, as well as on-line.

In addition to the software library collection, the museum also has a
separate library dedicated to preservation of the all-important
documentation which, if lost, often results in the loss of much of the
ability to comprehend the functionality of, let alone maintain, executables
and associated data.


On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 7:12 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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