(Arthur, you can safely skip to the bottom paragraph where I propose setting up some backup infrastructure.)
Date: Wednesday, October 02, 2019 12:15 PM
Let's put this in ... a database ^_^!
Far be it from me to stop you, but making conventional databases available over the Internet is a hard problem from a practical configuration point of view. Directly exposing a database server is dangerous, and providing a safe front-end that's easily usable is no small matter. In addition, support for SQL temporal facilities is limited, so recovering from a bad change would be hard. I suppose people could checkout a SQLite database from git, but then there would have to be an informal pessimistic lock of some kind.
I actually wasn't planning on making write access to that database generally available.... Instead, people would submit changes, I suppose perhaps as SQL statements/sdbi operations using templates we provide, and we'd automatically publish updates
The temporal issue is easily handled by the log it first architecture I'm so fond of. If you need to go back in time, just start from a good checkpoint and replay the transactions after that through the last good one. This approach is also great for testing.
Google Sheets, on the other hand, is fairly secure, user-friendly, concurrent, historical, your data is backed up by a commercial enterprise (we lost a lot of R6RS history because the trusted person serving it up dropped off the net and there were no backups), and even has a SQLish language in the QUERY function, though it cannot join.
Joins are central to my plans of using it, and the institutional danger of losing your Google account is way too high for my tastes, even if you're paying them money, they still want to automate everything. After the nymwars Google+ debacle, I reduced my exposure to them to nothing except of course Google Groups subscriptions.
The blessed transaction log could be put on GitHub, it only adds records to the end. For more formal and general backup, it would be easy to set up a minimum size 500GB 108 US$/year rsync.net account with the keys to the kingdom being spread out to e.g. Arthur and whomever else makes sense. Very easy to use, ssh, scp, and rsync of course, can even host git repositories, albeit without any frills. There's also a FreeBSD ZFS snapshot facility that by default does the last 7 days.
That would be quite a lot of space for backing up the relatively modest artifacts of our standardization efforts with a trusted and very tech savvy host. If we want geo-redundancy, the cost goes up to 189 US$/year, in which case I'd ask for some others to pitch in a bit.
- Harold