The idea is that, if Warren ever lost interest, we could keep the project fully operational and active by switching commitment from
.
I've had experience trying to recover stuff from
waybackmachine.com. It's great if it recognizes the text file as a text file and preserves it, but for example, RALF sources with a .RA extension were simply ignored over time and so old versions of OS/8 Adventure from
rickmurphy.net/advent/ were not available. Luckily in the case of OS/8 Adventure, Rick Murphy took time out of his busy life and recovered various of the interesting milestones in the development of the package.
I've produced a demonstration of historical curation of PDP-8 software packages using Rick Murphy's ADVENT as an example:
One of the projects I hope to work on is to put other packages into the same form.
Note that I chose fossil as the source code management system instead of git for two reasons:
1. The system preserves not only the software history, but also the Wiki docs, Issue resolution workflow items, and the discussion forums. When google decided to abandon
code.google.com, yes the packages that had active maintainers that chose to do the work and migrate them to github did preserve the code, and kept the projects going, but um.. the discussions about bugs, and the evolution in forums? LOST.
2. The other useful services, Wiki, Discussion Forum, and Issue resolution are all part of a SINGLE fossil installation. You don't have to decide which forum or wiki, or issue tracker to bolt on to your replica git collaboration space. And to presume that github will be the one around forever seems naive in light of the previous experience with
code.google.com..
Preservation is tricky. Curation is real work, and is definitely NOT a solved problem.
-Bill