web sites (was: Re: git is live)

[Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org>]

On Fri, 2013-10-25 at 19:25 +0200, John Darrington wrote:
> Why have two different web sites?  Have one as the canonical site, and
> make the other redirect to it.

The GNU project definitely will want to preserve the gnu.org page: they
prefer to have www.gnu.org/software/<pkg>/ resolve to something
appropriate.  It could be just an overview and point to the other site
for details, I guess: I'm not sure what the politics are there.  I'm not
sure what the history is behind the other site so I can't speak to that.


One note: the gnu.org site would be a lot nicer if it used the standard
template HTML.  Compare, for example:

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/
  vs.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/

Ditto for binutils.  In addition to the standard look and feel stuff, it
uses SSI to allow changing of banners for announcements etc.

It turns out to be quite simple to make your GNU site match the rest.
You can get this via CVS:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/web/www co www/server/standards

then look at the boilerplate.html file and replace the appropriate bits
with info on your project (there are good directions embedded in
comments in the HTML file), then replace your project's web CVS
index.html with the result.

For the second and subsequent times where you want to update your
project's page, you can use the patch-from-parent script (also available
at the above site).  Or do it by hand; it's usually not a big deal.