Hi,
In 2021, common-lisp.net has had two types of service interruptions: (1) mailing lists were not functioning correctly [while regular mail traffic seemed to be] an (2) deployment of project sites wasn't working. The latter only came to light recently, but seems to have existed for some time.
Since I can remember (probably since the creation of the service) has common-lisp.net hosted its project webpages on its main domain in a sub directory, which at times has been called /project/, or /projects/ or even /p/. This setup mixes project hosting with hosting for the main site itself and restricts the tooling we can use to host the projects' websites. The reason for the sites not deploying well is that I've implemented a workaround in the past to be able to deploy projects using GitLab Pages while our deployment model (deploying to the /project/ subdirectory on the main domain) is out of line with what GitLab Pages were designed for. At the same time, our configuration is running with extensive sets of rewrite rules to keep historic URLs "working" and redirected to (hopefully) existing current URLs, which also extremely complicates our setup.
In order to simplify our setup (and eliminate the deployment problems we're experiencing) and at the same time add support for requests like those from Marco who wants to be able to deploy sites for multiple projects under the same umbrella, I've decided I want to move projects' sites to their own (sub)domains. In the past I thought this would need to be subdomains along the lines of https://<project>.project.common-lisp.net/. Although that's a deployment model that would work with GitLab Pages, I've decided against it. I'll move the hosted projects to:
https://<project>.common-lisp.dev/
(I acquired common-lisp.dev for this purpose this morning.)
The setup I'm proposing is that we have a good look at the tons of rewrite rules we have currently in place and clean up the rewrite rules that we don't need anymore. Then, we create rewrite rules for the current project namespaces at https://common-lisp.net/project/<project>/ to map to https://<project>.common-lisp.dev/. There are a few projects which aren't using GitLab Pages to deploy their websites yet, mostly because they have no active maintainers. These projects will keep being served from their current locations on the filesystem of the common-lisp.net host, but their content will be available through the new <project>.common-lisp.dev URL space.
Further change proposals in order to separate the mail flow for the mailing lists from the regular mail flow (and thereby further reducing integration between components) are upcoming, but I'll need to address one thing at a time (due to time constraints).
Are there any comments, remarks, additions, things you want me to take into account with respect to the above?