Re: Internet Archive APIs useful as fallback?

[bill-auger]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:57:04 +0100 Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> The Internet Archive is not in the business of archiving software, but
> it’d be interesting to see if it archives tarballs that people put on
> “random” web sites

FWIW, The Internet Archive is not *in the business* of *anything* - it
is a charity - but more importantly, this post is referring to the
"Wayback Machine"; which is not identical to "The Internet Archive", but
is a very specialized subset of the archive.org service - the Wayback
Machine differs from the main Internet Archive both in function and
scope

namely, the Wayback Machine only caches web pages, it does so in a
semi-automated fashion, carries no metadata, and does not download any
external assets (such as images and tarballs or any external HTML in
frames) unless they are defined explicitly in the HTML of the base web
page (such as data-uri images and other blobs)

the larger Internet Archive is generally useful for anything that is
naturally suitable for archival and it has a specific section/tags for
software; but that is entirely a manual process done by a registered
user; and all items are associated with that registered account