[ocaml-infra] staging site for ocaml.org

[Amir Chaudhry]

On 4 Jun 2013, at 15:24, Martin Keegan <martin at no.ucant.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Jun 2013, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> 
>> If compiling a dev version of the site is really so onerous, we could
>> make it one of the staging tasks in the OCamlot bot to compile and push
>> to a staging site. 
> 
> It's not onerous for me - but it is certainly more onerous than a site
> which is pure markdown and which just needs to be pushed, as the markdown
> compile is done on the post-receive hook server-side.

Seems like you're thinking of something more like Jekyll?
That works well for GitHub pages but custom scripts are turned off, presumably for security (you can't execute your custom code on their machines).  That's fine for simple blog sites but not for anything complex (though people have put together other tools for that [1]).  Any staging server would have the same concern so this isn't really Markdown specific.

Even in the case of a Jekyll site, if you wanted other people to look at your changes first, you'd still have to have either (1) push it to another github repo where their jekyll installation would run or (2) run jekyll locally and put the www files on a server somewhere.  In other words, the steps are largely the same.  For ocaml.org, I agree that there is a lot to download and run before you can get to the point of running `make` but we may be able to make that more streamlined over time.  


>> It doesn't seem too hard to just run a one-off OPAM installation though.
> 
> Not hard at all, given that it's just cut-n-paste into the shell, but it
> took 25 minutes to download and compile all the bits.
> 
> This is probably too minor a point for us all to be discussing in such
> detail! :)

Not at all! I found this exchange pretty useful in terms of understanding what someone was trying to achieve.  Thanks for the comments :)

[1] http://octopress.org


> Mk
> 
> -- 
> Martin Keegan, @mk270, +44 7779 296469, http://mk.ucant.org/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Infrastructure mailing list
> Infrastructure at lists.ocaml.org
> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/infrastructure