Migration from Alioth to Salsa
As mentioned in the 'Membership of the debian-gis-team on Salsa' thread
[0], the GitLab instance to replace Alioth has entered beta.
Yesterday I started to import the git repositories from Alioth manually,
because I didn't find a comfortable API. Today I continued using
Christoph Bergs salsa-import script [1]. Importing large repositories
(e.g. gdal, mapnik, etc) tends to fail, which requires creating the bare
repository manually and pusing all branches and tags to Salsa from a
checkout. At the time of writing the imports for the qgis &
qgis-upstream repositories in still in progress, and these are likely to
fail as well.
There are some outstanding issues before we can switch to using Salsa:
1) Configuring git hooks:
1.1) email notifications (git-multimail or alternative)
1.2) IRC notifications (KGB or alternative)
2) Website migration
2.1) Policy migration
3) pkg-grass-devel mailinglist
4) Membership permissions
There is currently no visibility of activity in the GitLab repositories
other than through its web interface. We need at least email
notifications, and I'd preferably also keep the IRC notifications. For
the former I've filed an issue in the Salsa tracker [2], for the latter
I hope that the Perl team will create an alternative.
Regarding the website, and specifically the team policy, we may be able
to use GitLab pages for that in the future, but according to the Salsa
beta announcement more work is needed to support those in the future.
More teams use the Alioth webspace, so a common solution is likely to
surface in the near future.
Like the Alioth webspace, its mailinglist are used by many teams, so
we're not alone there either. Dominic Hargreaves has offered to maintain
lists.alioth.debian.org [4], but the future of the Alioth mailinglists
remains unclear. Using email functionality of tracker.debian.org may be
an option, or perhaps we can get debian-gis-devel@lists.debian.org. The
latter seems unlikely since the "listmasters emphasize that only a
fraction of the mailing lists from Alioth are suitable for being moved
to lists.debian.org" [5].
Currently I've granted all member Developer permissions because this is
required to allow pushing to the repositories. Only the Master & Owner
permissions allow creating new repositories. This is more limited than
on Alioth, and not ideal. I don't want to be the single point of failure
for the debian-gis-team on Salsa like David was for the OSM team on
Alioth. We'll need more Owners who can use those permissions
responsibly. And preferably allow all members to create new repositories
in the debian-gis-team namespace.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/2017/12/msg00017.html
[1] http://www.df7cb.de/blog/2017/Salsa_batch_import.html
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/salsa/support/issues/5
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/12/msg00003.html
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/09/msg00270.html
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/09/msg00004.html
Kind Regards,
Bas
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