Subject: The Trove project -- next-generation Internet software archiving
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:21:13 GMT

The Trove project is aimed at producing the next-generation Internet
software archive facility.  Its objective is to replace the ad-hoc
hacks now used at Sunsite, CPAN, PSA, the Red Hat contrib directory
and elsewhere with a flexible and powerful Web-accessible database
that will, among other things, support unified searches across all
Trove archives.

As the person who does most of the package-filing work on Sunsite, I
became convinced some months ago that the classical FTP-tree model of
Internet software archive just doesn't cut it any more.  It's way too
intensive of maintainer time, making it unsustainable as Linux
explodes in popularity.  It also makes software excessively hard to
find unless you're a regular archive user with a map of the site in
your head.

The thin WWW wrappers in place at Sunsite and CPAN make those archives
a little prettier, but don't solve the underlying scaling problems.
The Python guys over at PSA do a bit better on the user side through
effective leveraging of free-text searching, but haven't solved the
maintainer-intensiveness problem.  And none of the ad-hoc archives
talk to or can search each other.

We need a fundamentally new approach, and we need it before these
vital pieces of community infrastructure collapse under their own
weight.  I consider a solution to this problem critical enough that
Trove is now my top priority after continuing the public push for
the open-source development mode.

The Trove project has been up and running for month or so.  The design
has firmed up nicely and working code is beginning to appear.  If you
think you might be interested in helping solve these problems, please
look over the Trove project page at:

<a
href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove">http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/trove</a>

There's a design document accessible in HTML there that describes the
project's objectives and present status in detail.  

I'm aiming high.  I want the maintainers of the major existing
archives to buy in early, so that by year-end the present creaking
infrastructure can be replaced with something better.  I can deliver
Sunsite myself.  The Python community's leaders are already on board,
and so is Red Hat.  And we've had an expression of interest from
CPAN's maintainer.  Anybody else running an archive site is urged to
join now so we can be sure to accomodate your community's needs in the
design.

We could use more design input (especially from people running archives now),
and we'll need a fair bit of implementation and testing help.  CGI and Web
experts would be particularly welcome, also people who grok PGP and
web-session-authentication problems.
		
--
Eric S. Raymond, http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr
