Incidentally, this is mostly off-topic, and kind of theoretical, but
maybe interesting to some:
It's reasonable that Mike would see it that way, since apparently he's
the responsible sysadmin who'd just been handed someone else's big
messy pile of toys he has to carefully organize, repair, and upgrade,
but I personally doubt that the openacs.org box is messy because,
"It's been hacked on by so many folks over so long".
In my time at aD and elsewhere, I've seen plenty of boxes that were
under tight "control" (where control was defined as, taking away
anyone else's ability to fix or change anything on the box), by
"professional" sysadmins, but which were more or less a mess. Why?
IMO, because those nominally in "control" were in fact quite
disorganzied; never wrote anything down, no documents, no notes, no
how to fix things in an emergency, no who to call, no internal how-to
or best practices info, no delegation, little or no communication with
anyone else, nothing. It was the disorganization, plus the
resulting lack of any real transparency or specific accountability,
that was the problem, not the lack (or presence) of so-called
"control" over the box. IMNSHO.
