The publication of HAL code: a first step towards open source

Written by CCSD

The CCSD took part on November 19 and 20 in the Sprint Open source organized by the #bluehats community. The #bluehats community brings together all people who contributed contributing to free projects published and/or used by the French public administration.

For this event, the CCSD publishes the code of HAL: it is now available on github.

At the beginning, HAL was not developed to allow its installation by everyone. It was designed to be used « only » on the hal.archives-ouvertes.fr platform. Many platform-specific hacks have been hard-coded, making the use in a different context very difficult or impossible.

We are currently cleaning up this code in order to make it more compatible, in an open and collaborative development way:

  • to make it more maintainable,
  • to make it more compliant with good practices,
  • to make websites accessible in the sense of WAI,
  • to end security issues,
  • to allow a migration of Zend.

Even if the code is published for download, for this moment, we will not maintain backward compatibility.

Therefore, this can be seen as a first step towards a future availability of an open source.