Hi Sean, I have to say, it took me some time as well to find the sources of the site.
Because the site is still relying on Hadoop, it is either getting the current site fixed or starting over with the current best-practice for hosting a website, which is using the gitpubsub approach. As Avro is already using gitbox, I would indeed suggest to request a new git repository for the site [1]. When Avro is at a point of having something useful in the repository, infra can simply switch from the current svn approach to gitpubsub. In a lot of (new) Apache projects this approach, together with jenkins, is already used. A member of the pmc-chairs group can grant users the sufficient permissions for Jenkins [2]. Using a tool as jekyll [3] would be perfect if you want to update the site using markdown. Roy [1] https://gitbox.apache.org/setup/newrepo.html [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Jenkins [3] https://jekyllrb.com/ 2018-04-21 16:53 GMT+01:00 Sean Busbey <[email protected]>: > Hi Folks! > > Today I tried to work through some helpful contributions to our > website[1], and I ran smack into some pretty severe tech debt for our web > presence. > > For starters, none of our documentation talks about how to build / deploy > or contribute to the website. That's pretty bad. What's worse, our "How To > Contribute" guide is on the obsolete ASF wiki and points folks to SVN from > when we were a subproject of Apache Hadoop (!!!). > > Eventually, I chased down that our website stuff is run out of this old > svn repo: > > https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/avro/site > > 1. edits go into "author" > 2. the website is built using ant and Apache Forrest > 3. results will be in "publish" > 4. both edits and their results are committed at once to svn > 5 ... > 6. website is updated > > What's worse, our website still relies on an old version of the Hadoop > website infra. author/skins is an svn external reference to their website > as it was in 2014. This is why our footer materials all refer to Hadoop and > not to Avro. > > Before any of us start digging into fixing some of this stuff, what do we > want from our website? > > Humbly I suggest we just eat the up-front investment in switching to the > current asf infra best-practice. I think that's using gitpubsub to publish > from a stand-alone git repo. In atleast one other project I'm on, the > source material for the website lives in the main repo and a jenkins job > automatically publishes updates. > > I'd love us to also switch to markdown, asciidoc, or anything else that > isn't editing xml. > > > [1]: AVRO-2170, AVRO-2171 >
