[steering] Moving Forward

[Dean Mah]

Hello,

It has come to my attention that Ron will be re-locating at the end of
March.  Ron has been able to cover for us while at his current
location but this won't be the case at the new location.  So we need
to accelerate our plans to get evolt.org moved.

First things first.  I don't think that there is any opposition in
general to the proposed plan.  We just need to finalize this by a vote
on theforum.  I think that we should take javier's message and send it
to theforum.  We need to finish votes within about 5 days, I'd say.

I think it is generally accepted, without working out the details of
full functionality (thetips, archiving), to move the lists to e.o.uk.
b.e.o is already there, or at least a mirror.

We need to warn m.e.o users that the service is going away and they
need to grab their data.  We need to finalize if/how we are forwarding
e-mail and redirecting hosting.

d.e.o can likely move to e.o.uk without a problem if PHP/MySQL is
there.

So, the big problem is w.e.o and or.e.o.  We're not likely to get
another host with Oracle so we need to migrate the database.  With the
database change there are CMS changes.  We need to finalize the
database changes quickly and start work on the porting of code.

I think, we should try to make the changes so that future porting will
be database independent, i.e., don't use INDENTITY, AUTO-INCREMENT,
SEQUENCES, etc. if possible.  For the code changes we should identify
modules that need to be changed and assign a priority to them so we
can split up the work and port the majority of functionality by the
time we have to move.  I don't think that this needs to be a time
consuming task, a gut-feel is good enough.  Failing that, let's just
get started.

Dean