Reading the Synfig story I have known that originally this program was developed by a software development company called Voria. Finally the source code of synfig was released under GNU GPL license and open to community development.
There is a question that dance around my mind: Who’s now behind the scenes? I know who’s on the forefront of synfig development but I don’t know who’s supporting the hosting of the website, the wiki or this forum. And the most important thing: Will be it there for ever? Could be synfig site/wiki/forum be unsopported in a future?
I’m sure that there is an obvoius answer for that and I’ll be very calm if someone explain it to me.
Regarding to this matter I wonder if it is possible to open a donation area in the wiki to let supportive people give its contributions in order to defray the possible costs of wiki/forum or what ever host cost.
The wiki/forum server is a VPS (Virtual Private Server), paid for by darco and used for synfig and a few of his personal sites. I have full access to it and pxegeek has access to the synfig parts and can restart mysql if it crashes. The synfig.com website is hosted at sourceforge.net like the lists, bug tracker and so on. svn.voria.com is hosted on another server of darco’s. I’ll be sticking around to support the synfig stuff on the VPS and will properly pass that on if I need to. I need to setup off-server backups to ensure we have backups of the wiki and forums available in case of issues with the server, I’ll get onto that this week.
It is possible that darco will not be able to host the server in the future, I’m sure he will let us know if that is the case and we can move the forum and wiki to sourceforge.
Setting up a donations page on the wiki sounds like a good idea, I’m sure darco would appreciate help paying for the server, I’ll contact him later this week.
Hi pabs!
Thanks for the quick and clean reply on the question.
Synfig is a great piece of software and would be a pity loose its development for a host problem.
Please give thanks to darco for his generous support and for the great software he created. I hope someday he can find free time to join again to develop and clean the source code.
And thanks to you pabs for your personal help on the maintaining of the site, the wiki and the set up of this forum.
We now have daily, monthly and weekly on-server backups of the wiki files and database and the forums files and database. Obviously files linked externally will not be backed up. I’ll be syncing these to my laptop every so often. darco and pxegeek also have access to these, I’m mailing darco about it now. For those interested, here is the current disk usage of the daily backups:
100M mediawiki-files.tar.gz
6.1M mediawiki-db.sql.gz
44K phpbb-db.sql.gz
24K phpbb-files.tar.gz
