Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the welcome. To clarify, common-lisp.net is a valuable
resource already and it provides repo hosting, so they aren't
necessarily incompatible, but I worry that maintaining and improving
the services that are available elsewhere comes at an opportunity cost
that seems all the greater due to the small size of the CL community.

I agree that repo hosting and issue tracking can be found elsewhere. However, currently we are already providing the service. My point being that I think that - even though there's an initial "time investment" to it - the proposed direction will make it much easier to do the job of the maintainers, since there are quite a number fewer components to be configured, maintained and updated.

From the above, I conclude that you're fine with the proposed role for common-lisp.net and would even settle for less, if less relates to services available elsewhere. Looking at it that way, you support the proposal :-) Taking your advice, I'll make sure to be careful not to spend too much time on the migration in areas where such effort wouldn't be justified by efficiency on part of the maintainers or usability for end-users.

Of course, there's a lot of history and context I'm missing, that's
just my take as a relative outsider.

Yes. And because you're an outsider, you have a much clearer view on our situation than I do :-) [troubled with all the history of the past 12 years of common-lisp.net hosting...]

I joined this list a week or so ago to ask how to clone a hosted repo.
I could see the gitweb but there was no clone url provided. I was
about to write to the list when, on reading another thread I saw a
clone url for a different project and worked out the required
transform from project to git url.

I'd be happy to look into how CL resources are and could be indexed.
Though time is always limited, happily CL is now my day job so I hope
to become a more effective user of the language this year.

Well, maybe one or two people could join to lift the weight together?

BTW my email to you and the list bounced from the list. The uribl
service said that one of the urls in the email was rejected, but I've
entered all of them into the uribl site and they are either unknown or
whitelisted. I hope this message gets through.

Thanks for the heads-up. The error has been fixed in the mean time. Turns out the URL wasn't blacklisted, but the blacklist doesn't service entities going through Google's DNS or OpenDNS (which we're using with our hosting service). [I've implemented a way to do the blacklist lookups directly at the RBL's DNS servers.]

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.

Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.