[Building Sakai] RSF Present and Future

[Antranig Basman]

Thanks for your concern, Dr. Chuck.
Sakai management has certainly a good track record for keeping a steady 
eye on its trajectory on the 5 year timespan, and I'm also glad to see 
its tradition of orderly and sober decision-making combined with respect 
for community-oriented thinking continues unabated :)
I and the Sakai maintenance team have already been communicating this 
week on how to produce an RSF maintenance release addressing SAK-17877 
amongst other packaging issues. As I stated in my earlier mail, I remain 
committed to providing support needed for RSF for the Sakai community 
and you will certainly be amongst the first to hear if this situation 
changes. The RSF resources are as I already explained not under the 
control of "some Cambridge IT person" but have received committed 
resources for hosting from the Fluid Foundation for the forseeable future.
Putting the RSF/Sakai Maven artefacts in the Sakai Maven repo to me 
seems perfectly sensible, but starting an independent SVN fork at 
present does not. There are still RSF users active outside the Sakai 
community, and Fluid are perfectly happy to provide commit access to the 
RSF tree to selected members of the Sakai maintenance team as well as 
review of patches.
In the meantime I welcome your enthusiasm for ensuring that the RSF 
source base not be lost - I do encourage you to burn a copy to CD to 
keep in your sock drawer or perhaps upload a version to Amazon S3. I 
will be happy to mail you a tarball.

Yours,
Antranig.

csev wrote:
> This topic always ends in a hung jury :)
> 
> The -1 folks have great reasons until some Cambridge IT person stops backing up the server or asks around and says "are we using this old server" - and since no one in earshot says how important the server is, they shut it off and send it to property disposition and then we have *no source code at all*.
> 
> I am not concerned about next week or next year - I am concerned about five years from now.
> 
> There is no comparison between this and an apache project - of course we would never fork Apache - but RSF @ Cambridge is dead.  And over time folks will simply start to forget about it.   For now we know where the source is so I say we get a copy while the getting is good.   In five years - we will have the jars in our repo but not even have a single clue as to how to regenerate the jars.
> 
> This is like Y3K - we do what is lowest effort for the moment knowing full well that by the time this becomes a problem - we will no longer be around and so we simply won't care that it all falls apart.
> 
> /Chuck
> 
> 
>