Re: Retired old INN Subversion and Trac sites

Harald Welte <[email protected]> writes:

> I was wondering if you were aware of archiveteam.org and whether there
> was any contact prior to the shututdown so they can make sure to
> preserve a historical archive.  See
> https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Trac and
> https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot - who I believe

> People with an interest in software archaeology today or in the future
> might appreciate if the original data (tracdb) or at least an archive of
> the web interface to it could be preserved fro history.

I believe everything in Subversion has already been imported into Git.
The Subversion repository is of course not the original; it itself is a
conversion I made years ago of the CVS repository.  In both cases, I tried
to preserve as much of the semantic content as possible.

The other Trac data was largely imported into GitHub issues, although
there were various problems with that import process so the record in
GitHub is not perfect.  But Trac was a fairly new thing that I added and
that wasn't really that heavily used.  I imported a pile of stuff from
personal email into it and Julien used it for some things, but the
majority of the development discussion has always been on the mailing
list, and most of the tickets are just records of that mailing list
traffic.

I suspect there's not much remaining data of much archeological value that
isn't in GitHub issues.  Which of course is its own archival problem since
GitHub is a commercial product with its own agendas, but that's at least a
problem shared by many, many other projects.

That said, I'll of course keep an archive of the final state, and should
anyone want a copy of it for whatever reason, let me know.  I was thinking
about putting at least an archive of the Subversion data somewhere on
archives.eyrie.org and on the ISC archive site.  Maybe I should do that
with the archive of the old CVS repository as well; I do also have a copy
of that.

> Undoubtedly INN had huge significance in the development of UseNet and
> the Internet, and it might be more relevant to preserve its history than
> the history of many other FOSS projects.

Most of the really interesting history predates CVS, and certainly
predates Trac.  At this point, that's mostly captured in the tarball
releases and in whatever mailing list archives ISC has kept (or that other
mailing list archive sites have maintained).

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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