Re: [seul-edu] New indices for SEUL/edu software page

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 03:00:18PM -0400, Doug Loss wrote:
> Or Zope, which is already running on SEUL.  I have no problem with any of
> these.  It's just that the responsibility for keeping all this up-to-date
> has fallen my way, and I don't have the time to set all this up and
> transfer the info we have to it.  If someone will step forward to do so,
> we'll happily move to a database-driven software listing.  (Incidentally,
> this has been proposed more than once before, and the people who agreed to
> do the work didn't follow through; so you can see where I may be a bit
> jaundiced about the whole thing.)  If we can do this nicely and get the
> information transferred cleanly, I'm all for it.
 
I agree that we should do the db approach if we can -- but I don't
have the time to volunteer to make it work. The wiki approach that Doug
is taking feels like it's decades out of date -- once people invented
databases and scripts and could automatically rebuild a spiffy-looking
page, they stopped updating things by hand -- precisely because of things
like the multiple-ways-to-index-things problem.

Two notes:

a) If you choose Zope, it's easily possible that I will refuse to host it.
The current wiki is buggy and bad for belegost's health -- it frequently
has runaway processes that grow to take over the machine. So as I move
services from belegost to moria, I probably will *not* move Zope/wiki.

b) Take a look at the freeduc database. http://www.ofset.org/freeduc/
and http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ofset/catalog/ 
I would advocate just using ofset's freeduc database and not keeping
our own list of educational software for Linux, except they only list
the DFSG-free packages, whereas seul/edu wants to list a broader variety
of packages.  (Please don't start a thread about the preceding sentence,
unless you actually have new content since the last thread.)

But certainly we can use their catalog code, and improve it as necessary.
Does it look like something that could be adapted (or simply used)
to do what we want?

--Roger