Re: Need Volunteers for Website Working Committee

>
>>> With all services docker you'll have to individually check them for
>>> security updates and so on.
>> 
>> Most likely not, because you'll only be using popular software that 
>> have well-maintained official images.
>
> Still someone needs to notice and restart the services
> to get the new images downloaded, right?

Same as with a .deb-installed Gitlab: automatic upgrades are not reliable.

>
>>>>   And For coordination of several
>>>> containers running our several services, do you think we could we
>>>> could use something simple such as docker-compose or would we better
>>>> resort to a "real" orchestration setup such as kubernetes?
>>> 
>>> Ouch.
>>> No, please let's avoid the complexity.
>> 
>> For your case, K8s is a reasonably easy way to have HA without many 
>> issues.
>> You can go very cheap with 3 Hetzner hosts x 50 EUR per month, and use 
>> Ubuntu with MicroK8s on the hosts.
>
> If Hetzner does all the K8s infrastructure and we pay just for the
> worker nodes, maybe it'll be easy enough.
>
> Doing Kubernetes hosting is _way_ out of scope for c-l.net, IMO.

Sure, there are various ways. My point is that HA, done by someone not necessarily the c-l.net staff, is nowadays necessary.

>
>>>> In addition to HA (High Availability)
>>> 
>>> HA adds complexity - and so adds to support load.
>>> I'm not sure we need it.
>> 
>> I'm not sure you can afford not to have som for of HA. common-lisp.net 
>> already has a reputation of poor reliability
>> and continuing on the same path doesn't seem a very good idea.
>> All the new lispers, and many of the old ones, have moved to other 
>> services (mostly Github) for good reasons.
>
> I don't think this is because of reliability of the hosting service -
> more of convenience resp. familiarity when comparing Gitlab to GitHub.

I know for a fact (as was told to me personally), that there are people who left because of reliability issues and (initially) lack of features in regards to CI/CD. Consider this: many of those who used to use c-l.net are free software advocates and would prefer to avoid Github, but left anyway.


>>>>  2. Maybe for a dedicated gitlab host as well, because that program
>>>> is so freaking heavy.
>> 
>> I suggest switching to a lighter-weight alternative like Gitea or, even 
>> better, bailing out of source hosting altogether.
>> It take a lot of work to provide a capable service, which volunteers 
>> can hardly provide.
>
> If we decide not to host any Git UI (and no ticket tracker, no pipeline, 
> etc.),
> I'll still vote to have git repositories - as a reference source/backup.

Sure, you can keep a backup using a bare-bones service that doesn't do CI/CD or reviews, but I adivse joining
a project like Codeberg for the code development part.

For me, the best way to help the community would be to maintain a Docker image that's kept up-to-date with all the CL implementations, and perhaps host the CI/CD runners usable from other environments (Github, Gitlab.com, Codeberg).
Even better if you could convince Franz and LW allow free use of their Enterprise versions for open-source development.

-- 
Stelian Ionescu