Re: New lintian warning: vcs-deprecated-in-debian-infrastructure

[Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>]

On 14984 March 1977, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

>> That was announced several times and it will not reside. 
> Why? Lack of volunteers maintaining a redirector, or new service 
> incompatible with indirections, or?

Multiple things, and it ended up a decision we took at the meeting in
Hamburg.

First off we (the salsa admins) would have liked to take over the
hostname. But then we discussed and thought through it. What would it
get us? A host of problems and not much gain actually. It sounds simple
"Hey the host is same, no need to change packages" - but that is not
true. Gitlab is very different in its layout and handling of things than
old alioth.

Before you come "Well, apache redirect map", think of it. We have that
right now already. Actually twice. There is one map on alioth itself,
trying to map old stuff into cgit, and there is the new alioth
redirector mapping migrated stuff to alioth. Now what, that only does a
small subset of requests, http. Not git. (Not ssh). And it needs manual
action for each and every migrated package...

Very much not optimal. And the cgit one, while being there for a long
time, still does not work for all cases, is a mess, declared as
"unmaintainable" by its maintainer.

So redirecting is a bad way, its hard to maintain and only does it for a
subset of the needed pieces. The redirector WILL go away in the not-too
distant future, it is a hacky interims solution.

So, moving the hostname. Could have done that. When? How about

"Here is salsa, its all new gitlab, entirely different to alioth, btw,
anonscm moved over, if you didn't migrate your repos yet, you won't see
them on anonscm anymore"?

Or would

"Here is salsa, its all new gitlab, entirely different to alioth, btw,
in half a year, anonscm moves over, if you migrate your repos before,
you won't see them on anonscm until then"

be better?

And both leave out that part of "And hey, the whole entirely different
to alioth means its a new url, please immediately update your packages
vcs-whatever entries for it", which means an upload anyways..


So that got us to "It would be nice. It does not work usefully. -> It
won't happen". And basically you can expect another hostname change to
happen *AGAIN* in the future, should we switch from gitlab to
whatever-is-good-then, UNLESS that hypothetical thing is about identical
on the whole layout. THEN one can do a "switchover day is X, all repos
and groups and whatnot will be forcefully migrated then, no user action
needed".

-- 
bye, Joerg