Help Needed Managing Sunsite

Eric S. Raymond wrote in to seek out some help for maintaining the ever popular Sunsite archives. You can click the link below to read what this will mean. Hopefully there a few kind souls out there that can help keep this important site running smoothly. Update Eric wrote back to say thanks, he's got over 100 responses, plus Red Hat has donated money to hire someone to help keep Sunsite alive.

The following was written by Eric S. Raymond

This is a plea for help. I can't maintain Sunsite alone anymore. Counting only active projects, I maintain fetchmail and several key FAQs. I'm supposed to be leading the Trove project. I have two technical manuscript reviews due this month, the next INTERCAL release is waiting on me, and Donald Knuth just sent me an invitation to implement Turingol.

I was pretty heavily loaded and working ten-hour days even before the necessity to do the whole Open Source thing landed on me like a ton of bricks six months ago. Now, on top of my own projects, I'm doing several press contacts a week, maintaining the www.opensource.org site, and spending a significant amount of time as a traveling evangelist (I'm just back from giving the keynote speech at Open Source Developer Day). I've had to shelve several projects I cared about just to keep my head above water.

In fact I'm so busy now that I just had to turn down an invitation to receive an award from the Seybold folks on 31 Aug -- because that weekend I have to speak at MITRE in Washington D.C. and make a start on changing the Pentagon's technology-procurement rules to favor open-source software.

Something had to give, and it's been the hours every week I used to spend on Sunsite. There are more than three hundred packages waiting to be filed there, I'm getting nagging mail from developers, and I can't handle it anymore.

I need at least three or four volunteers to do routine package filing on Sunsite. The job isn't very hard; I wrote a Perl application called `keeper' last year that automates away most of the nasty bits and has plenty of on-line help. It takes steady attention every week, though, to keep the incoming queue from piling up too high.

The other good news is that the job is temporary. One of the things I'm trying to reclaim time to do is the Trove project, which will replace Sunsite's clunky and archaic FTP tree with a Web-accessible database. Once this happens it will drastically cut the amount of maintainer time required. But I can't finish Trove if I'm running as fast as I can just to keep Sunsite maintained.

Please help; please email me at [e-mail] to volunteer. This job parallelizes nicely. If eight people can give it an hour a week, we're golden. If sixteen can give it half an hour a week we'll be just as good. Keeper is not hard to use, and you'll be performing a vital service to the entire Linux and open-source community.