Hello everybody,
PCRE and Exim share some infrastructure.
At the beginning of this year (2021) there was some discussion about Exim
infrastructure, but I never heard whether anything changed. I have now had
a communication from the managers of hummus.csx.cam.ac.uk
<
http://hummus.cam.ac.uk>, requesting that some other hosting arrangements
be made. There might have already been contact directly with the Exim
maintainers. Hummus was set up some time ago and is now running an
unsupported release of Ubuntu. I'm grateful to my former employer for
supporting Exim and PCRE for all this time. (It is nearly 14 years since I
retired.)
I have not kept up with Exim developments (except to note that it is still
going strong, which is gratifying), but I believe that hummus is still
supporting the mailing lists and bugzilla, though the source has moved to
github. Is that right?
PCRE is currently almost entirely hosted on hummus. The source is in a
subversion repository, and the mailing list and bugzilla handling is shared
with Exim. However, the pcre.org website and pcre.org DNS are separate and
generously supported by Andrew Ho. The website has links to the hummus
infrastructure.
This message is to start a discussion and eventually come to some consensus
as to how to move off hummus. These points occur to me:
1. It might be a good idea to separate Exim and PCRE entirely. It's just a
historical accident that they share some infrastructure. Unfortunately, the
pcre-dev mailing list is pcre-dev@???, though I suppose if we end up
with pcre-dev@???, there could be temporary forwarding from @exim.org.
On the other hand, if it turns out simpler to keep things as they are, but
just on another host, I will not object.
2. I am not getting any younger, so whatever happens to PCRE should be what
seems best for long-term maintenance/development by others, rather than
keeping any arrangements just to suit what my fingers currently know how to
do.
3. Having said that, there are several sites that pull the PCRE sources
from the subversion repo automatically on a regular basis, in order to run
various tests. It would be less disruptive if they could continue without
having to update to something else. There is also documentation that
specifies how to get the current sources from the repo and the release
tarballs are at (e.g.)
https://ftp.pcre.org/pub/pcre/pcre2-10.37.tar.gz,
which is currently hosted on hummus.
Comments, ideas, and suggestions, please!
Regards,
Philip
