[okfn-help] KnowledgeForge repository on Open Textbooks

Thu May 1 11:40:56 UTC 2014

On Sun, Apr 27, 2014, at 23:24, Matthew Brett wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Knowledgeforge.net seems to be down, and has been for a few days.
> 
> Is knowledgeforge.net still supported?  Is there anything I can do to
> help?  Is this the right place to ask?

Hi Matthew,

After engaging on a lengthy yak-shaving exercise yesterday (for those of
you who are not familiar with the term, this should give you some idea:
https://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif) knowledgeforge.net is mostly
resurrected.

I should make clear that not all of the site is working. Subversion and
Mercurial services seem to be mostly ok, but Trac has problems and I
haven't tested webdav, www, and friends. If anyone has systems chops and
wishes to volunteer their services in bringing an ageing and
*horrifically* messy kforge deployment back to life (Matthew?) then I'm
happy to coordinate that.

Realistically, we can't provide support for these services any longer --
the software is approaching 6 years old, and has a complex dependency
chain involving even older software. I spent several hours yesterday
compiling postgres and psycopg by hand, because there's no simple way to
set up the versions KForge requires on newer hardware/operating systems.

As such, I'll be writing some of this stuff up and sending an email both
here and to knowledgeforge-user at lists.okfn.org, detailing our desire to
pass the knowledgeforge.net hosting on to somebody else. If we're unable
to do so within a reasonable timeframe (say three months) then we will,
sadly, have to shut the service down.

-N