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

[Sean Hinchee <henesy.dev@gmail.com>]

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