Re: git-scm.com status report

[Samuel Lijin <sxlijin@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 5:58 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 12:54:53AM -0600, Samuel Lijin wrote:
>
>> In theory, you could also dump the build artifacts to a GH Pages repo
>> and host it from there, although I don't know if you would run up
>> against any of the usage limits[0]. The immediate problem I see with
>> that approach, though, is that I have no idea how any of the dynamic
>> stuff (e.g. search) would be replaced.
>
> I've talked with Pages people and they say it shouldn't be a big deal to
> host. The main issue is that it's not _just_ a static site. It's a site
> that's static once built, but a lot of the content is auto-generated
> from other sources (git manpages, Pro Git and its translations, etc).
>
> So there's work involved in moving that generation step to whatever the
> new process is (it's fine if it's running "make" locally after a Git
> release and pushing up the result).

Yep, noticed that when I cloned the repo the other day. Still
wrangling with my own setup so that I can build everything locally. I
imagine it would also be possible to set up some sort of CI/CD
pipeline to handle generating build artifacts automatically; so to be
honest, I don't think any of the static assets would pose a
significant problem.

The bigger issue, in my opinion, is that there seems to be a fair
amount of non-trivial back-end stuff
(https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/blob/master/spec/controllers/site_controller_spec.rb,
https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/blob/master/app/controllers/site_controller.rb)
including an Elasticsearch layer. (The redirects would be mildly
inconvenient to handle with Pages, but like the static asset
generation, should be more than doable.)

>> A question: there's a DB schema in there. Does the site still use a DB?
>
> It does use the database to hold all of the bits that aren't checked
> into Git. So renderings of the manpages, the latest release git version,
> etc. AFAIK, it's all things that I would be comfortable committing into
> a git repository.
>
> -Peff

In the meantime, I've also pinged a friend at Digital Ocean about
their hosting options and they've expressed interest. At the very
least, they seem to offer a lot more than Heroku for 230$/mo[0], and I
imagine it wouldn't be impossible to reduce the hosting costs by an
order of magnitude. Think it's worth looking into?

[0] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet