Alioth/FAQ - Debian Wiki

This page is maintained primarily by the administrators of alioth.debian.org (see Alioth) to help spread knowledge about the service. You can also check the other Alioth-related pages:

Contents

Common questions
Common problems
Gforge
1. Source ?
Subversion/arch/bzr/git/hg/darcs/CVS repositories
More questions ?

1. Common questions

1.1. Why do I have a "-guest" suffix on my account ?

All Debian developers automatically have their usual Debian account on Alioth. Since new people join Debian all the time, a login name already used on alioth may be in conflict with the login of a new Debian developer.

That's why all public accounts created on Alioth have a "-guest" suffix.

1.2. Will you accept my project ?

Please read the guidelines given in the announce of Alioth. Alioth is meant as a service for the Debian community. More precisely, any free software project with a Debian developer in the team can be hosted on alioth.debian.org. Non-Debian developers can request projects, but they'll be rejected if their purpose is not directly related to Debian. If you can find a Debian Developer willing to sponsor your project, the project will most likely be approved. In that case, ask the sponsor to register the project for you.

1.3. Do I need an Alioth project ?

Yes if:

you want to host upstream development of something
the project is affiliated with a Debian team who is going to maintain many packages

No if:

you just need a SVN/bzr/git/hg/darcs repository for package maintenance. But you can still host that repository on Alioth within the collab-maint project. See the link below.

Please check Alioth/PackagingProject for generic guidelines.

1.4. How can I remove my old -guest account ? an unused project ?

You can't do that yourself. Please request the removal via the siteadmin support request tracker.

1.5. How can I migrate my -guest account to my new official Debian account ?

There's no way to migrate anything. You need to contact all project admins of projects that you are part of and ask them to add the new account and to remove the old -guest account. When you're done, please request the removal of the old -guest account.

You need not request addition/removal to/from the collab-maint project. All official Debian developers have access to it by default and removing an account also removes it from all projects.

Note that since Alioth does not use the official password database, you need to request a new password before you can log in with your Debian account.

1.6. How can I remove spam from list archives?

Unfortunately there's no easy way to do it. List archives are owned by a dedicated user and we're not sure how to properly regenerate the HTML pages anyway. In addition, regenerating the archives would result in URL changes for the messages. A future version of mailman or switching to lurker or lists.debian.org's version of mhonarc would fix this.

1.7. What is the SSH key fingerprint of alioth?

See Alioth/SSH.

2. Common problems

2.1. I try to identify on the web but I get "username doesn't exist"

If you just created your account, remember that your username has a "-guest" suffix.

2.2. I created my account on Alioth but I can't login via ssh

The alioth account doesn't imply a unix account. You get a unix account only when you're added to a project. Unix accounts are created daily, thus if you have just been added to a project, please wait 24 hours.

If after that delay, you still can't login, please contact the admins.

2.3. I'm a Debian developer but I can't connect to alioth.debian.org with my Debian password

Your alioth account has a different password from your usual Debian one. To activate your alioth account, you have to request a new password. The gforge-inject.pl script, responsible for retrieving the latest list of Debian accounts and adding the missing ones to the Gforge database, runs hourly.

2.4. I lost the password for a mailing list

Please send a mail to admin@alioth.debian.org requesting that the password be reset. You'll only get a new password if your email corresponds to someone that is part of the project. Please indicate if you're the list owner or not.

2.5. BTS/ftpmasters messages to lists are held for moderation

If your list is set as Maintainer, and depending on your list configuration, messages from BTS and other sources will be held for moderation with a "message has implicit destination" reason.

To whitelist those messages go to "privacy options" -> "spam filters" in the list administration interface. From here you can match against headers and put "accept" as action for messages matching those rules.

Most likely some of the rules you want to apply are:

^Sender:.*debbugs@.*.debian.org.*
^From:.*noreply@release.debian.org.*
^From:.*@ftp-master.debian.org.*

Those will whitelist messages from BTS, from testing migration scripts, and from ftpmasters respectively.

2.6. I'm getting lots of spam on the forums/trackers

You need to restrict anonymous posting to the forums and trackers. For this you have to edit the rights associated to the "observer" role. In your project, click in the "administration" tab and then click on the "Modify observer" button (on the right, just below the list of members).

2.7. Something deletes my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file

See Alioth/SSH.

2.8. SSH port is blocked, it doesn't ask me my password anymore

See Alioth/SSH.

3. Gforge

Alioth runs Gforge. You can read there the Gforge documentation. Alioth is running the last version (4.5).

3.1. Source ?

Alioth uses a modified version of Gforge. It is stored in a bzr branch: bzr get nosmart+http://bzr.debian.org/~lolando/bzr/gforge/patched/alioth/ You can might also find a working copy on ~rmas/gforge+alioth/ or ~lolando/gforge+alioth/.

Feel free to send us patches that apply to this tree if you want to get something fixed in a more timely fashion.

4. Subversion/arch/bzr/git/hg/darcs/CVS repositories

The repositories are hosted on svn.debian.org, arch.debian.org, bzr.debian.org, git.debian.org, hg.debian.org, darcs.debian.org and cvs.alioth.debian.org. They are all hosted by alioth.debian.org itself.

CVS repositories are directly handled by Gforge while the other are manually created by the Alioth admins. They are however tied to Gforge projects for authentication and access control.

4.1. How do I create a subversion/arch/bzr/git/hg/darcs repository for my project ?

Please file a support request and ask for it. Don't forget to give the unix name of your project in your subject.

If you asked a repository when you requested the Alioth project, your repository may be already created. Please check that before submitting a report request! It's very annoying to be asked to do something that has already been done...

4.2. Can I use baz/tla/another arch implementation ?

Your arch repository is an empty directory. You can use any tool that you want provided that it has a method to access it which works with the services available on arch.debian.org (sftp, rsync over ssh, http for read-only access).

4.3. I switched to Subversion, how do I disable CVS ?

Please visit the administration page of your project and go to the "edit public infos" page. You can disable CVS there. If you want to completely empty the CVS repository, then please do that yourself on alioth.debian.org. You have write access to /cvsroot/<myproject>/ and you can remove everything there if needed.

4.4. I switched to something else than CVS, how to make the new SCM visible on the Gforge project page?

You can't. Our gforge installation only has integrated support for CVS. So the best you can do is to deactivate the CVS repository and advertise your new repository on your project web page (the page hosted at myproject.alioth.debian.org).

4.5. I gave a new developer commit access, how soon until it takes effect ?

If he already has a Unix account, he should be added to the dedicated group almost immediately. He might to have to wait a bit because the NSS information might be cached by nscd.

5. More questions ?

Please be sure to checkout the other dedicated pages:

You can also join the channel #alioth on irc.debian.org.

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