FAQ offering

["Robert S. Mela" <rmela shore net>]

OK, I'm just getting started with GNOME, and wasted most of Friday
evening trying to compile.  I won't have another shot for another
week.

So I'm willing to take some responsibility for the FAQ until I'm 

For the short term:

If the traffic costs aren't excessive (>$100) I could just mirror the
thing on my ISP account.

For the longer term:

I'd be willing to set up and maintain a domain for this purpose 
(e.g., gnome-docs.org).

All hits to the FAQ would to enter through a TOC at gnome-docs.org.

Initially, if traffic is not excessive, all links on the FAQ can point to
gnome-docs.org.

Otherwise, content off the TOC would be distributed across various
locations (to distribute bandwidth costs).  HREFs in the TOC would be
dynamically generated from a list of hosts.

The list would be maintained according the the following criteria:

	1 Number of requests sent to site <= number of requests
	  the site owner agreed to support

	2 Site is "live"
		-- site responds with HTTP 200 within reasonable time

	3 Site is "correct" 
		-- doc served is valid GNOME FAQ doc and current FAQ version.


1) Server-side:

hrefs in the TOC would be generated dynamically by rotating selection
from list of known repositories.  A heartbeat process would be responsible
for maintaining this list on the basis of site liveness and correctness.

Site owners cld be given a mirror script to keep their sites up-to-date.

2) Client-side

A Java applet on the client would responsible for choosing a repository for
each link.  If any repository failed to respond correctly or within a
timeout, the applet would choose another repository from its list.