Warren's Position on Future of PUPS/TUHS

[Warren Toomey]

Hi all,
	Well I've had a few comments back from people about the future of
things on the PUPS & TUHS front. I've sat down & knocked up a short
proposal which I'd be happy with. The overarching goal is to give everybody
what they want :-) Anyway, send me comments and suggestions, or plain old
disagreements!

Thanks,
	Warren


	A Discussion Paper on The Future of PUPS, TUHS and the Archive
	==============================================================

Policy
------

The PDP-11 Unix Preservation Society (PUPS) goes back to being a group
specifically focussed on the versions of Unix for the PDP-11 platform.

The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS) will be an umbrella group to support
efforts to preserve or maintain all versions of Unix that are no longer
considered to be mainstream. The type of support is outlined below.

Mechanism
---------

The pups at minnie mailing list will remain an ``all-encompassing'' mailing
list for those people who are active in, or interested in, the aims of the
Unix Heritage Society. It will be renamed to be tuhs at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
If enough people request it, a PUPS-specific mailing list will be set up.

As part of TUHS aim of support, mailing lists on minnie can be set up
for those groups who wish to come under the TUHS umbrella. One or more
people from each group will be the list maintainer.

If the information is not huge, minnie can offer web space for these
groups, too. I'm already doing this for the Quasijarus project.

The PUPS Archive will be renamed `The Unix Heritage Archive'. The top-level
will contain files & information that is generic. There will be sublevels
in the form platform/vendor/version. We might need some other categories
for multi-platform systems like the 4BSDs. As an example, nearly all of the
current archive will move under a PDP-11/ directory. But directories like
Applications/ and Lists/ will stay where they are.

If possible and where there are volunteers, each section of the archive
will be maintained by its own maintainer. Minnie will provide disk space
for all sections, so that there is a `one-stop' place to keep things.
However, some groups may want to maintain a separate archive & existence.
In this case, TUHS will set up pointers to their efforts.


Volunteers & Mirrors
--------------------

Some of the existing volunteers and archive mirror maintainers may not
wish to maintain a copy of the full TUHS archive. That's their perogative.
In fact, it might be useful to `name' each section of the full archive.
For example, someone might only want to mirror the VAX section. Perhaps
this can be called the VAX Unix Archive.

I can modify the mechanism of ordering archive copies so that:

	+ specific volunteers can nominate which archive sections they carry
	+ requesters can order specific sections, or all, and find out how
	  big each section is
	+ requests will only be sent to those volunteers who can do them


Copyright & License Issues
--------------------------

At present, most things in the archive are protected by licenses and/or
copyright. This probably isn't going to change soon. The current mechanisms
to ensure access by license holders will be preserved.

Given the aims of TUHS, I am prepared to keep in the archive anything that
is Unix-related for antiquated or non-mainstream systems. We may not
be able to release some of this due to license or copyright reasons. In
that case, it will be kept hidden away in the archive until it can be
released. It won't be mirrored or be available for copying in any way
until that time.

A Personal Note
---------------

I'd like to maintain the PDP-11 archive, and initially do the TUHS stuff
(including web pages, mailing lists, top-level of the archive). I'll set
up platform-specific (or other-specific) levels as long as there is someone
who will volunteer to maintain that area, and any web pages and mailing
lists associated with them.

It would also be a good idea to have an understudy or two in the wings,
just in case I get hit by a bus or something.

Conclusion
----------

I'm sure there are other issues (especially implementation ones) that
I've missed above, but hopefully you get the general idea of my proposal
for future direction of PUPS and TUHS.

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