[SAC] Virtual Hosts Policy

[John Graham]

I like http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal ... it makes 
my brain happy :)

Howard Butler wrote:
> All,
>
> I propose that we make every attempt to use virtual hosts and explicit 
> DNS for services that we provide.  This document will outline the 
> proposal and why I think this is important for us in the future.
>
> As Jason pointed out, some search engines penalize certain layouts.  
> As evidenced by the "Subversion is 403 right now" thread, 
> monkeypatching with rewrites can have unintended consequences and 
> eventually get downright impossible to track through and maintain.  
> For an organization as multifaceted as we are, I do not think that 
> mere rewriting is a long term solution.
>
> Our experience on Collabnet showed us that a massive proliferation of 
> DNS-bound services can be a large burden.  Knowing where you are and 
> what you were dealing with was tiring and tedious.  On the other hand, 
> explicit separation of either projects or services will provide us 
> flexibility in the future.  I propose that we choose one -- separate 
> based on services or separate based on project -- for things like 
> Trac, Subversion, Buildbot, and Web hosting.  CN's approach was ok 
> except for the fact that it proliferated so many "projects" that 
> things got crazy.  Right now, we have all of our eggs in this bucket, 
> but in the future we may want to spread a few around.
>
> So, we have things look like
> http://gdal.osgeo.org/trac http://gdal.osgeo.org/svn
>
> or
> http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal
>
> but not like
> http://svn.osgeo.org/svn/gdal http://trac.osgeo.org/trac/gdal
>
>
> Some virtues of this approach include:
> - Our ability to offload this service from the existing single machine 
> to someplace else when and if we need to without much service 
> disruption and minimal migration (URL relocation pain).
> - Guess-able and non-redundant URLs, once we establish a pattern and 
> stick to it.
> - Fat-fingering a setting in one virtual host doesn't hose everyone 
> else.  If we're to distribute the administration load, it is important 
> that changes be as localized as possible.
>
>
> Thoughts or comments?  Project based or service based (makes no 
> difference to me, as long as we choose one)?  When we come to 
> agreement on how to proceed, I'll write up a "policy doc" for the wiki 
> that we can follow when adding new services/projects.
>
> Howard
>
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