On Sun, 2014-05-11 at 21:38 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> I'm not disagreeing, I think we're providing a much poorer service level
> for Alioth than what we should do. Sadly, I don't have the motivation
> to spend much time there nowadays.
I have for years hosted my own projects in a minimalistic fashion [0],
and as a consequence have been nagged to provide "modern amenities" like
issue trackers and DCVS. The obvious solution would be to move to free
hosting like sourceforge, but sourceforge is closed source. Then I
joined Debian. Alioth seemed like a natural fit, so I started moving my
projects to it.
But now I've decided that's not such a good idea. Not because of some
of the issues mentioned in this thread - like DVCS support of lacking
features in Fusion Forge. I can work around them.
My problem is Alioth isn't reliable enough. In week or so I used it:
a. As Ole mentioned, there are 180 odd open support requests, dating
back 7 years. It's not that things aren't being done - Stephen Gran
in particular appears to regularly attend to the list and close
issues. However, there should be no support requests open for more
than a few weeks (and ideally at most a couple of days). Many of
these old "support requests" are bugs or features, and there are
separate trackers for those. In other words, the support list needs
to be triaged. If after triage there are still support requests
more than a month old, the clearly Alioth needs extra admin
manpower. Right now it is difficult to tell if manpower is really
the issue.
b. For a while when I was using it is was horribly slow (as in taking
minutes to send a response to a HTTP request). I could not see
why. After a day or so the issue went away and it because usable
again.
c. Then I started getting mysterious failures. After a bit of digging
around I noticed /tmp was at 100%. Someone fixed this after a few
hours.
d. At the same time I noticed disk space it is sitting 94% usage.
The amount of disk used is under 600GB.
e. I suspect running out of disk space on /tmp caused a number of
other issues for me [1]. The details aren't relevant here. What is
relevant is in order to diagnose what was going I poked around the
file system, and noticed a number of other much older projects were
suffering from the same issues. Since this means among other things
they can't use the DVCS, presumably they had been abandoned.
f. After seeing all this, I decided I had better do some "due
diligence" and what backup arrangements were in place. As far as
I can tell there aren't any.
At this point I reluctantly decided I had to use why I was trying to
avoid - a commercial provider running close source.
If three things changed on Alioth I would move back. They are:
A. Solve the disk space problems.
B. A backup system.
C. Support list triaged, and it's length viewed as a KPI.
If the Alioth team thinks I could be useful in getting this things done,
I'd be happy to become part of it. Even if they don't, I'd be happy to
donate 2 x 4TB drives so the disk space issue can be fixed - assuming
there are remote hands available to fit them.
[0] http://www.stuart.id.au/russell/files
[1]
https://alioth.debian.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=314680&group_id=1&atid=200001
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