[MLton] mlton.org server

Tue Mar 1 15:13:10 PST 2011

Hi Stephen and Matthew,

As you both know, MLton is very important to our company, so if there is
anything we can do to assist with some of these logistical issues we would
be happy to.  This might be in the form of work on tasks we might be able to
perform such as work on the website or financial contributions if you decide
to go with paid services rather than something free such as SourceForge.

I guess these changes would have a couple of primary goals in my mind:

1)  Remove administration burdens from MLton developers so the time they
have can be focused on the fun stuff of actually working on the compiler.

2)  Better promote MLton so that more people learn about it, try it, use it,
and want to contribute to it.

I do not have first hand experience as a user or administrator of
SourceForge, so if you have used it and liked it then most likely it would
be good for goal 1 above.  I'm not sure about goal 2 however.  It has always
been my impression that SourceForge is so focused on developers that it does
not present well to the outside world.  My perception is that a project has
more credibility if it has its own website (e.g. mlton.org) verses a project
page on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlton/).  Perhaps I
just do not understand how it works though.  Is there some way to use
SourceForge to stealthily host mlton.org as opposed to appearing as a
project within SourceForge?

If you wanted to explore alternatives, the first question would be whether
you go with paid services or free services.

For free services (web option), Google sites is pretty good.  I see that
Stephen is now hosting his personal site there.

There are a lot of inexpensive web hosting options also.  If you prefer the
content-management-as-a-service route, squarespace.com offers something
somewhat like Google sites -- you do all the updating of the website from a
web browser.  Alternatively, you can roll-your own.  Our company uses
linode.com who offers a linux virtual machine starting at $20.  Under this
route you manage the web server yourself.   We of course use SML for our
content management :)  We use ML Server pages for our external site (
www.reactive-systems.com) and SMLServer for our internal intranet.  Both
work great.  Once it is set up, its pretty easy to maintain, and of course
it would be good PR to be using SML to implement the site.   I can give more
details if you decide to consider this route.  If you do, we could help get
it set up and with the porting of the current site (which as Matthew points
out is not going to be trivial no matter which new framework you go with).

As for svn and email discussion lists, as I said I don't have experience
with SourceForge, so that might work fine.  There are commercial
alternatives.  We host our own svn repository, but we had done a bit of
investigation of companies that offer svn hosting.  There are a bunch of
them, some very inexpensive.  For Mailman hosting there seem to be some, but
not as many providers.  From some quick Google searching, I could not
determine if the hosting services allow you to have the archive on your own
site.  In my mind this would be the biggest advantage of such a service over
SourceForge.  That is the archive would just appear on mlton.org (as it does
now) instead of at SourceForge.

This topic is related to something I have been thinking about for a while,
namely the promotion of Standard ML in general through standardml.org.
 Stephen, I see you are listed as project manager there.  Are you at all
involved with that any more?   Since it has not been updated recently, I
worry that newcomers might mistakenly get the impression that not much is
going on with the language any more.  I think that it is really a selling
point of MLton that it implements a formally defined language that has a
number of high-quality compilers that (more or less) conform to the same
standard.  So it seems to me that promotion of Standard ML in general is
also good for MLton.

Would it ever make sense to form something analogous to the Apache
Foundation to promote Standard ML?  Perhaps the "Standard ML Foundation"?
The idea would be for it to provide the types of infrastructure support that
this thread is discussing for the different SML-related projects (different
compilers, standardml.org, etc.).  For each of the services brought up (web,
email discussion list, svn), one account would probably be adequate to
support a number of different SML projects.   A foundation would provide a
vehicle for companies such as ours to cleanly donate towards this type of
infrastructure.   The company would give the money to the foundation and
then the foundation would purchase the services to support the various
activities.  I believe some of the service providers also offer discounts to
non-profits.

Whatever you guys decide we would like to support you how we can.  We
appreciate the work of all the MLton developers.

Steve Sims

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Matthew Fluet <matthew.fluet at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Stephen Weeks <sweeks at sweeks.com> wrote:
> > I'd like to bring up the topic of handing off the administration of
> mlton.org
> > (mail, web, svn), so I can stop maintaining the current mlton.orgserver.  This
> > is by no means urgent, but I simply do not have time to do a good job of
> > maintaining the server which is becoming more and more stale.  I'd like
> to
> > transfer before the lack of good administration bites us.
> >
> > Options are to go to another server maintained by someone else, or to use
> hosted
> > solutions for individual services.  I lean toward the latter.  Whatever
> we do, I
> > think it would be good to get something that we believe will work for at
> least a
> > 5-year time frame.
> >
> > Thoughts?  Volunteers?
>
> I've been thinking about this as well.  I completely agree that the
> current mlton.org server isn't serving us well, and the overhead of
> administering the whole server (mail, web, wiki, svn, ...) is too
> much.  I'm also of the opinion that moving to one or more project
> hosting sites would be the right choice.
>
> My vote is to move back to SourceForge.net.  Perhaps not as sexy as
> Google, but I think it has a number of advantages:
>  * mlton already has a project on SourceForge
>  * Stephen and I are both admins of that project
>  * The most (D)VCS choices: CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar
>    - I think we should stick with SVN during the transition, but
> should have options for switching after the move
>  * Mailman mailing lists with the option to import existing archives
>  * Easily accessible content for backups
>  * All services hosted under one host
>  * Should satisfy the 5+ year time frame criteria.
>
> The only major gotcha that I can see is that the Wiki content is
> harder to move.  SourceForge offers MediaWiki (rather than MoinMoin),
> but I suspect that we could script most of the conversion.  In any
> case, this would be a gotcha with any move, even if only due to the
> fact that we're using an old version of MoinMoin on mlton.org so there
> would be some upgrade pain.  We'll probably lose most if not all of
> our nice wiki macros and also nice syntax highlighting of SML code;
> again, I think this would be true for any switch to a hosted wiki
> service where we can't install custom extensions.  But, I don't think
> it is insurmountable or a block to transitioning.
>
> _______________________________________________
> MLton mailing list
> MLton at mlton.org
> http://mlton.org/mailman/listinfo/mlton
>

-- 
Steve Sims
Chief Executive Officer - Reactive Systems, Inc.
Email: sims at reactive-systems.com
Phone: (+1) 919-324-3507 ext 101
Web: http://www.reactive-systems.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/attachments/20110301/83e90926/attachment.htm