[m-dev.] SourceForge web site

[Fergus Henderson]

Hi,

Since users had reported problems accessing the Melbourne web site,
I had a look at the SourceForge one.

First, a heads up on how the SourceForge site works.
The site is named mercury.sourceforget.net.  It's running Linux.
If you have a sourceforge account, and you are listed as
a member of the Mercury project, then you can log in to it using ssh.
The web pages are stored in /home/groups/mercury/.
Files can be copied to and from the site using scp, or you can use cvs.
It's pretty simple, really -- that's about it.

There were a lot of problems with the current SourceForge site.
In particular:

1. The web pages were set up with remote CVS using Tyson's account
   (:pserver:tyson at hydra.cs.mu.oz.au) which meant that only Tyson
   could update them, since only he had the password.
2. The files were not up-to-date w.r.t. our CVS repository,
   but also contained a lot of uncommitted changes.
3. There were some unresolved merge conflicts in bin/install_webpages
4. There were many dangling links to *.html,
   because the HTML files hadn't been created.  SourceForge runs php3
   directly from the web server, so they're not needed; but many of the
   links on our pages point to them.

To solve these problems, I did the following:

1.  I modified all the CVS/Repository files so that they use anonymous CVS
    (:pserver:guest at hydra.cs.mu.oz.au).
2.  I did a cvs update.
3.  I fixed bin/install_webpages manually.
4.  I copied the php3 executable to mercury.sourceforge.net, and edited the
    Makefile.common to use that copy rather than assuming that php3 lives
    in /usr/lib/cgi-bin, and then did `make'.

There's three issues that I haven't fully addressed:
	- I haven't done anything about the uncommitted changes.
	- I haven't done anything to ensure that the site remains
	  up-to-date in the future (e.g. setting up a cron job).

For the uncommitted changes, I think most of them (the ones for using
links to *.php3 rather than *.html) should be discarded.  It's simpler
to use the same approach with the HTML files on SourceForge as we do for
the Melbourne site (building them statically rather than dynamically),
and it may even be a bit more efficient that way.  Any objections?

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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