[task #15686] Removing original software URLs from Maneage?

[Boud Roukema]

Follow-up Comment #4, task #15686 (project reproduce):

Removing the original software URLs sounds like a bad idea to me, especially
during the development stage.

During the development stage of a project, it would be preferable that
researchers contribute their changes upstream to each of the individual
software packages - contributing back to the community. If the developers of a
project are slow to react, it will generally be better to create a fork to be
used while waiting for the developers to either merge a pull request or make a
better bug fix/improvement. This can be done reasonably efficiently with git,
but requiring an extra Zenodo archiving step each time there is an update
risks creating one more task that is quite slow - since AFAIK it requires
using a web interface and entering metadata. If there were a convenient
command line script to do this through an API, that might make sense - I don't
have much Zenodo experience to be sure about this.

During the finalisation stage, having Zenodo + maneage as effectively two
tarball servers is reasonable, but keeping the software source URLs (not
`webpages') in the maneage system seems best to me:

(i) Since maneage does not have a full software quality assurance pipeline
like in Debian, it's best that users can go directly to the source URLs, where
quality control (bugs, tasks) are generally handled. The reputations of the
URLs give a qualitatitve judgment of the software reliability (and
software-managed trust levels can be developed too).

(ii) Zenodo is not guaranteed to always be reliable - having a single point of
failure (or even just two points of failure) is risky in a system.

In Debian, the `tracker` and `download` pages both have obvious links to the
upstream URLs, e.g. https://tracker.debian.org/inhomog ("homepage")
https://packages.debian.org/source/stable/inhomog ("External resources -
homepage")

[comment #2 comment #2:]
> * We add an always-open task here. Anyone who wants to add a new software
(or different version of an existing one) can give links to its tarball so we
upload it to Zenodo and our own tarball repository.

This doesn't seem scalable to me.

I read through

git diff db2bd88..7d44e4d

but I haven't tried 7d44e4d yet.


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