Troggle is the software which runs the the expo cave survey data management and website.
In early 2019 the university computing service 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.
At the beginning of the 2019 expo two repos had been moved from mercurial to git: troggle and drawings (formerly called tunneldata).
The troggle software 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.
The tunneldata repo has also been migrated to git, and renamed 'drawings' as it includes therion data too these days.
The loser repo and expoweb repo need more care in migration (expoweb is the website content - which is published by troggle). Loser should have the old 1999-2004 CVS history restored, and maybe Tom's 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.
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.
Wookey has now moved 'expoweb' from mercurial to git largely "as-is" and will to use the git tools to patch up the history and to remove redundancies, rather than the original plan to tidy them up "at the time of conversion". Mark Shinwell is working on loser with him.
Sam continues to work on upgrading django from v1.7 on python 2.7.17 . We would like to upgrade django as quickly as possible because old versions of django have unpatched security issues. Upgrading to later django versions is a real pig - not helped by the fact that all the tools to help do it are now out of date for these very old django releases.
We planned to upgrade from django 1.7 to django 1.11, then port from python2 to python3 on the same version of django, then upgrade to as recent a version of django as we could. But we have discovered that django1.7 works just fine with python3, so we will probably move to python3 during June and then upgrade the server operating system from Debian stretch to buster before tackling the next step: thinking deeply about when we migrate from django to something else.
Enforced time at home is giving us a new impetus to writing and restructuring the documentation for everything.