On 12 Mar 2009, at 16:36, Peter Burnhill wrote:
> I think repositories are a place to store things.
Store? Get? Keep? They're all services :-)
> I've never signed up to the idea that they are a set of services,
> except that a repository might be thought to be capable of
> supporting three essential services: ingest (deposit), keep-safe and
> access (use). Of course, for a digital/network repository each of
> those may have multiple interpretation: typically m2m as well as hci
> for the ingest and access, say. At least that is how we conceived
> the minimally sufficient functionality for Jorum. Keep-safe also
> needs some interpretation.
Perhaps the key part of a source repository is that it is made to look
after (store, get, keep) a large number of highly synchronised,
formally interpretable modules. The services (oops) that it offers are
related to the business of using (and reusing) software code. Of
course, code is manufactured and used by users, so the whole social
network thingy might look very familiar.
As for code preservation (language migration, version retrofitting
etc) well, that is an issue, but no-one is suggesting that a
specialised group of librarians will do it instead of the code
producers themselves.
--
Les
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