> Chris, I'm sure you've been asked enough times before that you have some canned response you can point us to - how *exactly* would one personally make use of Magma as a repository. I'd prefer a tediously pedantic, explain everything in terms a complete dimwit can follow (believe me, I can play one of those) with more examples than you could imagine being needed by a Zabriskan Fontema[1].
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Yes, I still need to update my configs for the SS3 changeover.  And I
want it loading on the latest trunk.  Soon.

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> As a possibly more widely useful alternative to running a local copy, would it be reasonable to set up a network accessible repository? I'm thinking here of a read-only (or at least almost-only) system that can answer *all* the versions of a method (and other Useful Things Of Assorted Nature) via some easy to implement net api. Run it on a decently powerful machine and load up absolutely every version of every method that has ever been in a main image, and maybe even every package that has been published?

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Read-only might be doable, because it wouldn't require individual
user-accounts.  Some job on the server could commit the new MC
packages as they came in.

The challenge might be with connecting to the read-only Magma
repository across the open Internet.  I've long wanted to try to
address this but there are so many ways and things to learn; I could
actually use some guidance from the folks on this list on the best
approach to handle this.  Magma currently talks with a proprietary,
binary protocol and has not been sufficiently hardened from attack.

Could its binary protocol simply be tunneled through SSL (SSH?) and
would that be sufficient?  Would it be helpful at all for Magma to be
able to talk over HTTP?  Not necessarily for consumption via
web-browser, but just to be more.. "conventional" across the
Internet..?  Does that matter?

I would love to try the experiment Tim suggested, and the DB-side is
done and ready, but what is the best approach for the connectivity
across the internet?