Re: git-scm.com status report

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Feb 9, 2017, 02:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20170209021208.rvy7uww3qsktbf4a@genre.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <20170206182754.qxgzl7546i7u5wnw@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Feb 06, 2017 at 07:27:54PM +0100, Jeff King wrote:

Show 27 quoted lines

>   - It's mostly silly for this to be a Rails app at all. It's a static
>     site which occasionally sucks in and formats new content (like the
>     latest git version, new manpages, etc). The intent here was to make
>     something that would "just run" forever and pick up new versions
>     without human intervention. And that _does_ work, but it also makes
>     things more expensive and complicated than they need to be.
> 
>     So a viable alternative is to use some kind of static site
>     generator and have someone (or something) responsible for pulling in
>     the new git versions occasionally.
> 
>     A few people have expressed interesting this. There's some
>     preliminary work here:
> 
>       https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/pull/941
> 
>     and at least GitLab has expressed some interest. So I'll let people
>     coordinate in that PR or a new one what the result should look like.
>     Working patches trump discussion. :)
> 
>     I have also talked with the GitHub Pages people, and they think
>     hosting it as a Jekyll page wouldn't be a big deal performance-wise
>     (with the caveat that we'd need to pre-render the asciidoctor bits
>     ourselves, as Jekyll doesn't do asciidoc). So that's a viable option
>     for hosting it for effectively free (though I think we _would_ still
>     want to put a CDN in front of it). But if somebody has an
>     alternative option, that's fine, too.

My only concern with using GitHub Pages is that I don't believe it currently supports TLS on custom domains. Since we currently have TLS enabled, along with HTTP Strict Transport Security (as we should), such a configuration literally wouldn't work[0]. I think it's important that we continue to serve HTTPS only, anyway.

I agree that a static site is the way to go from a maintenance perspective, though. Jekyll does support Asciidoctor with a plugin, just not on GitHub Pages, so it would theoretically be possible to build the site as one big unit if we did it that way. I've played around with that plugin, so I'm happy to provide guidance if we want to do that.

[0] HSTS would prevent anyone who had visited the page from downgrading to an insecure connection for the next year.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
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