lists.alioth.debian.org migration project

Service status

The new service is live at https://alioth-lists.debian.net/

Announcement

Meeting notes

Introduction

As part of the alioth deprecation plan, lists.alioth.debian.org was migrated to a separate debian.net system run by DDs. List owners opted in to having their lists migrated; for public lists which were not opted in, the archives only were copied.

This is likely to be time limited period of a few years (1-2 release cycles).

Rationale

Whilst many of the functions of the alioth list server can be readily transferred elsewhere (eg discussion lists on lists.debian.org, or commit notification lists integrated with gitlab) around 50% of all packages in the archive use alioth mailing lists in the Maintainer field and are thus the primary contact point for the BTS and other contact with package maintainers. Whilst there are discussions on how to replace this need, we do not believe the upload of half of Debian to replace the Maintainer field will be practical (particularly for teams with many thousands of packages). This migration project will therefore allow continued these package maintainers to continue to receive bug reports and other emails for their packages during this transition.

People

The following individuals are working on this project:

Status

The service is live, and the migration/switchover happened on 14th April 2018.

Architecture and infrastructure

The service runs on a virtual machine provided by Dominic Hargreaves hosting an instance of Mailman 2 and the necessary front-end services (Apache, Exim et al). Administrative access is available to selected Debian Developers so that the administrative burden on individuals was not excessive.

A separate VM hosts static archives of lists which were not fully migrated, where the archives were public.

Other mailing list systems were not being considered owing to the larger amount of migration work.

References