[m-dev.] Hosting for Mercury downloads

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:27:01 +1000 (AEST), Julien Fischer <jfischer at opturion.com> wrote:
> > 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.

I agree with that.

> 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.)

For rotds, yes. For releases, the older ones should be online as well.

> > 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.)

I actually had a need for old releases for a paper I was writing three years ago,
but came up against both the problem Julien mentioned, and another problem:
the older a Mercury release, the less likely it is to be able to compile Mercury code
that was written recently, due to the addition of new features and the fixing of
old bugs. Nevertheless, I think it is important that the old releases, at least, should
be available *somewhere*, and if feasible, a selection of old rotds (something
like weekly or monthly) as well. I am also willing (and would like) to hold these
archival copies. I am also willing to help pay for the servers.

Zoltan.