Mirrors Not Updating

[bmwillrath]

Hey Team,

Recently found you guys as I run a Wordpress development on GIT and I was so excited, except my excitement has been dampened since many of the plugins don't seem to be updating lately. And I'm not talking a few days, I'm talking 4 months +

What do you need to get this back up and working? Its a hugely valuable resource you have and I'd hate to see it go to waste, I'd also really like to use these REPO's knowing and trusting that they will be up to date.

The one I found this morning is http://www.pluginmirror.com/plugins/wordpress-seo/ but I've found like 10 others in the last 3 days along.

Let me know what you need, as I really need this working.

Thanks.

[LeBenLeBen]

+1

[etlam]

@MikeHansenMe @tierra https://github.com/wp-plugins/wp-store-locator/ is also not up-to-date, could you please check it

[MikeHansenMe]

@voldemortensen was working on this. Any update?

[ananich]

Is that project alive?

[etlam]

Doesn't seem so, very sad!

[tierra]

It doesn't have to be. When I originally started the project, I released the code publicly under a GPL license in this very GitHub repository. It wouldn't be all that hard for someone else to spin up a new svnsync mirror of the plugins SVN repository, setup a new GitHub account, reconfigure this application, and setup some cronjobs to spin it all back up again. Absolutely every bit of code I wrote that powered this mirror is in this public repository.

I'm sorry that Bluehost hasn't felt that this project (or my employment) was worth maintaining for the last two years.

[acorbi]

hi everyone.

this is a pity indeed, there is so much potential for automation in deployment here...

does anyone know if somebody if this service has replicated somewhere else?

[mitar]

@tierra: So what is the problem why this is not running anymore? The site still seems to be up? Is there some worker which has been turned on? Or are there bugs which are preventing it from running?

[tierra]

Most likely, the jobs are just stuck on a buggy repo in one of the workflows, and it needs a nudge to get it going again (this used to happen maybe once a month or so). However, I haven't even had access to the two servers running this for over two years, and even though Bluehost claimed they would keep this up and running and maintained (I'm looking at you @voldemortensen), clearly no-one has bothered doing so since I left.

Again, I can't stress enough how ridiculously easy this was for me to build from scratch in less than 3 months, and how ridiculously easy it would be for anyone to take the code I've already written in those 3 months (because it is public and free), and spend a few weeks getting it spun back up and running on any other domain, with some other new GitHub account. It might take some slightly expensive servers to get it started up, but can easily be scaled back to hosting that probably only costs roughly $40/mo or so to keep it running once it's synced up; maybe even less if you make smart use of home hardware. There's several WordPress dev shops that would jump at the chance to sponsor those costs.

It blows my mind that WordPress still won't even investigate the possibility of offering git as an alternative to SVN for plugins, almost 3 years after I've proven that I could provide a fully synced git mirror of all 50k plugins on my own. Regardless, this really isn't out of anyone's reach to set back up, and I fully encourage everyone to try.

[voldemortensen]

Since I've been singled out here, and remember I do not speak on behalf of Bluehost, the lapse of service has absolutely nothing to do with any decisions I have made. I'm also the one who got this service back online after you deleted all of the repositories from github and pointed the domain somewhere else. Luckily, you don't have access to the server anymore, because you probably would have deleted the repositories there. I was able to push them back out to github.

And let me be clear, as soon as I can (which means more than it appears on the surface), I will have this service up and running.

[mitar]

@voldemortensen: Is there something a community could help here? Maybe some community members who would have access to servers to nudge them when something get stuck?

[voldemortensen]

@mitar, I appreciate the offer. However the issues at play aren't what tierra purports them to be.

[mitar]

So what I am thinking is just that whatever the issues are, it would be useful that there is more than one person who can help. :-) But I do not mind if things will get moving. I am just thinking of what could be helpful here from the community. Maybe it is just a bit of patience. :-)

[tierra]

I'm also the one who got this service back online after you deleted all of the repositories from github and pointed the domain somewhere else. Luckily, you don't have access to the server anymore, because you probably would have deleted the repositories there. I was able to push them back out to github.

It wasn't online and syncing when I started the process of removing the public repos, and it had already been broken for months. I took the only responsible action available to me: removing outdated public repos that aren't helpful sources for developers or users, making sure they acquired them from their original, up to date SVN sources. I only did this knowing that the source git repos were still on the servers, and could be pushed back up whenever you managed to fix it in a matter of hours. I've queued the entire list of them several times when I first built it, knowing it's a simple task. I'm sorry if you felt that was difficult somehow, I don't recall ever hearing you ask for help. Clearly you've been spending too much time with the core WordPress team, because you seem to have this impression that it was an act of frustration or revenge of some sort. Having designed, built, provisioned, and deployed this entire project single handed, I'm the last person that would just throw it away.

Besides, getting you to do that initial fix two years ago only happened because I did start removing repositories. Requests were made several times before that, and just fell on deaf ears.

Anyway, here we are again, with not even a hint about what is broken (what are the "issues at play" then?), how anyone can help, or when you might fix it ("as soon as I can" no longer applies after a year of waiting). Meanwhile, people not smart enough to check are still cloning outdated repos, and upstream developers have no possible way of pushing updates to them. Perhaps you understand the frustration here now?

If the "issues at play" are too hard for you to figure out, maybe it's time to just admit that you don't understand how this system works, or how to maintain it. It's either that, or you really don't care, and are just ignoring everyone here for a year now. Either way, let these people know so someone else can step up and offer to do something about it.