Re: git-scm.com status report

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

  - 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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