[Wikipedia-l] tarball

[Larry Sanger]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, David Merrill wrote:

> I'm adding wikipedia stuff to the LDP site. I will definitely pass the
> result past you before any publication, to make sure you're happy with
> how I've implemented it - since the official "policy" has never been
> finally established.
>
> I hope you know by now I will do everything I reasonably can to make
> sure what I do benefits the Wikipedia and doesn't "fork" it in any
> meaningful way. I'll be driving traffic to you, for one thing, and
> won't do any actual "editing" on my site. Clicking the "Edit this
> page" link will do just what it says -- but will take you to the
> Wikipedia to do your edits. I think the LDP probably gets a lot more
> traffic right now than the Wikipedia does (6 million page views a
> month), so that should be a good thing for you.

Yes, and yes.  Sounds great!

> I do have a problem though, that you can help me with if you will.
> It seems the tarball is not being updated regularly.

...and, we need to check on this *again*, now that the new software is
uploaded.  I thought the tarball was being updated either daily, or
weekly.  It turns out that http://www.wikipedia.com/tarballs is currently
inaccessible (probably due to the software change, eh, or the server
switchover?).  Anyway, there should be a notice on wikipedia.com/tarballs
stating (accurately!) how often it's updated.  This is very important for
our credibility as an open content/free project.

> I want to
> download and process it regularly, probably weekly. An rsync feed
> would be really ideal, because it would minimize the bandwidth
> requirements. It's not a problem on my end, but it could be on yours.
>
> But if an rsync feed is not in the cards, at least update the tarball.
> Can you get the tarballs updated on a more regular basis? It should
> just take a few minutes to write a script and put it in
> /etc/cron.daily.

We *were* doing it regularly.  :-(

Larry