[Act-dev] a few ideas for legacy Act

[Alex Muntada]

While there's people already taking care of future Act, I'm also
worried by legacy Act, both old, recent and current instances.
I just read in patch -p3 that we inscreased the bus factor to 2
people, which is great. I'm offering my help if you need it too.

That being addressed, my next worry is having a backup or slave
server. I think that this was also discussed in -p3 but I don't
know the details. I can offer a VM in my department premises in
www.ac.upc.edu for free.

The next idea is separating old instances (e.g. 2 years old) from
current and recent instances into a read-only server. And finally
having a loadbalanced or master/slave service for current and
recent instances.

Having a separate server for test instances was probably more
insteresting a while ago, but we now have the means to test our
changes in private Act boxes. I wouldn't spend much time on this
or maybe only in documenting and encouraging people to run their
own test instances and remove those from the production server.

I like the challenge of legacy systems and software and I think
that the migration path from legacy to future Act is a very
interesting use case that others can benefit from.

Cheers,
Alex