[m-dev.] Hosting for Mercury downloads

[Julien Fischer]

Hi Paul,

Sorry for the delayed response; I'm working my way through a backlog of e-mail.

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015, Paul Bone wrote:

> Julien and I have been coordinating to maintain the Mercury downloads, which
> is currently hosted on google cloud services.  It costs a few dollars per
> month, depending on usage.  (I have not yet made up a budget for the Mercury
> hosting expenses as I orginally inteded to do.)
>
> Alternatively we could move the downloads onto the web server, which is
> probably easier to administer.  It may be faster in some situations but
> definitly slower when under high load.  The webserver is a fixed 6-monthly
> cost of about $45USD, I also use it for other projects and personal e-mail.
> However the server also has a fixed capacity, and many many builds,
> sspecially ROTDs may fill it up.
>
> So my questions are, do we need to keep months/years of ROTDs?  Do we need
> to keep them online or is archiving them in our homes/offices good enough?

My suggestion would be as follows:

We should aim to keep the last 6 months to a year's worth of ROTDs online.
For older ROTDs, the only ones that are worth keeping online are those
that affect our ability to bootstrap the compiler from the last stable
release.  IMO, anything else can be archived offline.  (The discussion of
*how* it should be archive is a separate one.)

> As it is there is very little pre-2012 online.  If anyone requests something
> pre-2012 I may have it on a hard disk in my wardrobe and can retrieve it.

I have no problem archiving the pre-2012 stuff.  I cannot ever remember anyone
requesting it anyway.   (Beyond a certain point it gets quite difficult to
build old ROTDs anyway, unless you happen to be using an OS / C compiler of
a similar vintage.)

Julien.