[Savannah-hackers-public] Keeping web pages in something other than CVS

[Glenn Morris]

Hi,

The question "why can't I maintain my gnu.org web-pages in something
other than CVS" is one that crops up from time-to-time. It came up
again on the Emacs list recently:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-04/msg00526.html

Personally, I have zero problem using CVS for this, but some people
want to use their preferred VCS, eg:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2012-12/msg00060.html

The standard answer is that it is very difficult to change this,
because it involves internal gnu.org infrastructure:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2012-12/msg00072.html

I had an idea that it might not be so hard after all:

Keep your webpages in VCS-X.
Keep a checkout of that, and of the CVS version.
Have a script that runs via cron, watching for changes to the VCS-X version.
If it find any, commit them to the CVS version.
In other words, treat CVS just as a means to get the data onto
www.gnu.org, not as a repository for the history. Don't worry about
matching the history between CVS and VCS-X. All that matters is that
the current state of the directory tree is identical.

I imagine it just needs a bit of care with added and deleted files.
Maybe tools like this exist already.

Total GNU sysadmin time required = 0
Total Savannah admin time required = 0
No access required to GNU or Savannah servers

Maybe distribute the scripts via Savannah so that anyone can use them
(requires a few minutes of Savannah admin time)?

Or actually run them on Savannah (requires a bit more Savannah admin time).
Still requires zero sysadmin time. Then it would be totally
transparent to the users.

Or maybe such scripts belong more in gnulib than on Savannah, I don't know.
Makes it hard to know where to discuss it.

Apologies if this is obvious, or obviously wrong, or if you are just
sick of this subject. :)

I'm not interested in implementing this myself, but the next time
someone gripes about this, maybe suggest they consider this approach?