What is Alioth?

[http://alioth.debian.org Alioth.debian.org] is a Debian server running [http://gforge.org/ Gforge]. It's much like sourceforge or savannah but it's a service for Debian Developers.

News

Policy

Anyone can [http://alioth.debian.org/register/ ask for a new project] on Alioth but it will only be approved if it respects the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/03/msg00024.html project approval policy]. Any free software project where a Debian Developer is involved is fine. Any packaging project (whose name MUST start with "pkg-") is fine. If you're in the new maintainer queue, you need to indicate who your sponsor is.

Please check out ?AliothPackagingProject if you plan to use an alioth project to collaboratively maintain some packages.

Maintenance

Alioth has 4 administrators (IRC nick in parenthesis) :

They can all approve projects and create SVN/Arch/Bzr/Git repositories. The 3 first admins also have root rights on the machine.

They can be contacted via admin@alioth.debian.org. If you encounter a problem with alioth, you can [http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/?func=add&group_id=1&atid=200001 file a support request] on the [http://alioth.debian.org/projects/siteadmin/ siteadmin project]. Sometimes, when you need to prod an administrator to do something, you can join #alioth on irc.oftc.net ... they may help you.

Technical details

The machine hosting alioth.debian.org is a Xen host (wagner-xen1.debian.org) running on [http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=wagner wagner.debian.org]. The machine also hosts [http://svn.debian.org svn.debian.org], [http://arch.debian.org arch.debian.org], [http://bzr.debian.org bzr.debian.org] and [http://git.debian.org git.debian.org]. Those services are tightly related to Alioth since all the user accounts and the groups are taken from Gforge database. This means that you can only request subversion/arch/bzr/git repositories for existing alioth projects and that any member of that project will have access to the corresponding public repository.

The creation of a new repository requires an admin to execute /srv/{arch,bzr,git,svn}.debian.org/bin/newrepo <project-name> on alioth.debian.org. This tends to be done by batch, that's why we ask you to [http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/?func=add&group_id=1&atid=200001 file a specific support request] when you need a repository.

Alioth uses a modified version of Gforge. It is stored in a baz branch: http://arch.debian.org/arch/private/lolando/bazaar-0/gforge--alioth--4.5/. 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.

How can I help?

We tend to have a [http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/?atid=200001&group_id=1&func=browse big number of support requests], please help us deal with those. Sometimes it requires a change to Gforge, sometimes it only requires explanations to the submitter, you'll surely find something to do over there.

Other questions

Before asking an admin, please read the ["AliothFAQ"].