<ahref="c21bs.html">Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</a> - a story of the data management system up to Spring 1996. [This was less than five years after Tim Berners-Lee published the world's very first web page on 6th August 1991. So the expo website is nearly as old as the web itself.]
stored initially in a <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System">Concurrent Version System</a> repository, and later migrated to
<ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion">Subversion</a> [<em>now using a <ahref="onlinesystems.html#mercurial">DVCS</a> in 2019</em>].
new troggle dynamic pages into the same site. This is now the live system running everything (in 2019). Work on developing Troggle further still continues sporadically (see <ahref="computing/troggle-ish.html">Troggle notes</a>).</p>
<li><ahref="/repositories/home/expo/loser/graph/">loser</a> - the survex cave survey data (hg)</li>
<li><ahref="/cgit/drawings/.git/log">drawings</a> - the tunnel and therion cave data and drawings (git)</li>
<li><ahref="/repositories/home/expo/expoweb/graph">expoweb</a> - the website pages, handbook, generation scripts (hg)</li>
<li><ahref="/cgit/troggle/.git/log">troggle</a> - the database/software part of the survey data management system - see <ahref="computing/troggle-ish.html">notes on troggle</a> for further explanation (git)</li>
<p>In early 2019 the university computing serviuce upgraded its firewall rules which took the
server offline completely. Wookey eventually managed to find us free space (a virtual machine)
on a debian mirror server somewhere in Leicestershire (we think).
This move to a different secure server means that all ssh to the server now needs to use cryptographic keys tied to individual machines. There is an expo-nerds email list (all mailing lists are now hosted on wookware.org as the university list system restricted what non-Raven-users could do) to coordinate server fettling.
<p>At the beginning of the 2019 expo two repos had been moved from mercurial to git: troggle and drawings (formerly called tunneldata). The other two repos expoweb and loser remained on mercurial.
<p>troggle has been migrated to git, and the old erebus and cvs branches (pre 2010) removed. Some decrufting was done to get rid of log files, old copies of embedded javascript (codemirror, jquery etc) and some fat images no longer used.
<p>
tunneldata has also been migrated to git, and renamed 'drawings' as it includes therion data too these days.
<p>
The loser repo and expoweb repo need more care in migration. Loser should have the old 1999-2004 CVS history restored, and maybe toms annual snapshots from before that, so ancient history can usefully be researched (sometimes useful). It's also a good idea to add the 2015, 2016 and 2017 ARGE data we got (in 2017) added in the correct years so that it's possible to go back to an 'end of this year' checkout and get an accurate view of what was found (for making plots and length stats). All of that requires some history rewriting, which is best done at the time of conversion.
<p>
Similarly expoweb is full of bloat from fat images and surveys and one 82MB thesis that got checked in and then removed. Clearing that out is a good idea. I have a set of 'unused fat blob' lists which can be stripped out with git-gilter. It's not hard to make a 'do the conversion' script, ready for sometime after expo 2019 has calmed down.
Survey status page: "wall of shame" to keep track of who still needs to draw which surveys
</pre>
<h3><aid="arch">Archived updates</a></h3>
<p>Since 2008 we have been keeping detailed records of all data management system updates in the version control system.
Before then we manually maintained <ahref="../update.htm">a list of updates</a> which are now only of historical interest.
<p>A history of the expo website and software was published in Cambridge Underground 1996. A copy of this article <ahref="c21bs.html">Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</a> is archived here.
<h2>The data management system conventions bit</h2>
<p>This is likely to change with structural change to the site, with style changes which we expect to implement and with the method by which the info is actually stored and served up.</p>
<p>... and it's not written yet, either :-)</p>
<ul>
<li>Structure</li>
<li>Info for each cave – automatically generated by <tt>make-indxal4.pl</tt></li>
<li>Contents lists & relative links for multi-article publications like journals. Complicated by expo articles being in a separate hierarchy from journals.</li>
<li>Translations</li>
<li>Other people's work - the noinfo hierarchy.</li>
<li>Style guide for writing cave descriptions: correct use of boldface (<em>once</em> for each passage name, at the primary definition thereof; other uses of the name should be links to this, and certainly should not be bold.) </li>
