Translation(s): English - Français - Italiano -- ?한국어 - ?Russian

(!) ?Discussion


Alioth is broken, and there is nobody around to fix it. Don't ask the remaining people who give it life support to implement fixes and changes. There may eventually be replacements for some parts of it, but that is not now (2017-08).

Please subscribe to debian-devel-announce for updates.

What is Alioth?

Alioth.debian.org is a Debian server running FusionForge (used to be GForge). It's much like sourceforge or savannah but it's a service for Debian Developers and all other kinds of contributors together.

Benefits of registering an account on Alioth

An Alioth account provides several benefits:

News

Next update were in preparation at ?Alioth/News, but that is probably out of date now.

Deprecation of Alioth

Alioth was deprecated and will vanish with the wheezy EOL. Please read the hints below about specific Alioth services.

Git

The new GitLab-based service will only provide Git repositories hosting. Furthermore, users will need to migrate the repositories on their own - no automated, mass move is currently planned. This will help sort out outdated and unused repositories.

Other VCS

Since GitLab only supports Git, this means projects using other version control systems (VCS) like Mercurial, SVN or CVS will need to migrate. In May 2017, there were the following number of repositories on Alioth:

All the repositories not using git will either need to find another host or convert to git. Subversion, Mercurial and Bazaar repositories can be easily converted to git using the official documentation. Darcs repositories can also easily be converted. Finally, poor old CVS and Arch can *also* be converted using the git cvsimport and archimport commands.

Mailing lists

There isn't a replacement planned for mailing lists. The Alioth admins have suggested a few possible alternatives:

That the solutions proposed may be incomplete, but we do not want to be blocking the deployment of the Alioth replacement based on this issue. Besides, Alioth can keep running those mailing lists for a while...

Moving lists to lists.debian.org

Some mailing lists that were formerly hosted on Alioth may be eligible for being hosted on lists.debian.org. The lists eligible for migration must follow the requirements outlined on the "How to ask a mailing list" guide. The process is also the same as outlined on the guide.

The following kind of lists are probably acceptable for lists.debian.org:

Short version: file a bug on the pseudo-package lists.debian.org with the severity 'wishlist', with the following information:

Lists migrated from Alioth are expected to be open, that is:

If you do want the archive and/or the subscribers to be imported into your new mailing list, please:

Also, please understand that the requirements and features for lists on lists.debian.org are not the same as for a mailing list on Alioth, and the listmaster might reject your request. Lists.debian.org is not supposed to replace all mailing lists and aliases on Alioth.

tracker.debian.org

Smaller teams can use the mail interface of tracker.debian.org to register to package changes and reach out to other maintainers in a team. For example, commit notifications for third-party repositories can use the dispatch+<package>@tracker.debian.org email address to send notifications to maintainers. For the maintainer field, the <package>@packages.debian.org address should be used (although that needs the fix for 871575 to be deployed on ftp-master, see this discussion for details.

Clarification Request / Open Questions

gitlab notifications

In Gitlab, anyone can subscribe to different notifications for changes in a repository. This can replace the traditionnal -commit mailing lists that are on alioth, hopefully.

Other services

The following services will not be migrated and will be completely shutdown at the end of life of Alioth, and that includes:

Maintenance

Alioth has these administrators (IRC nick in parenthesis):

They can all approve projects and have full administrative rights on all project if needed. They 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 file a support request on the siteadmin project. Sometimes, when you need to prod an administrator to do something, you can join #alioth on irc.debian.org (OFTC) ... they may help you.

Technical details

The machine hosting alioth.debian.org is running on moszumanska.debian.org. It is also hosting svn.debian.org, arch.debian.org, bzr.debian.org, darcs.debian.org, git.debian.org, and hg.debian.org. Those services are tightly related to Alioth since all the user accounts and the groups are taken from FusionForge database. This means that you can only create VCS repositories for existing alioth projects and that any member of that project will have access to the corresponding public repository.

All VCS repositories can be automatically created by FusionForge: enable “Source code management (SCM)” in your project (this can be done in the “Admin” tab, click on “Edit public infos”), then go the “Admin“ page in the “SCM” tab and there you can choose the type of SCM wanted. The repository will be automatically created by a cron job some hours later.

Alioth uses a modified version of FusionForge, see ?Alioth/FAQ#src to grab the dedicated bzr branch. 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 big number of support requests, please help us deal with those. Sometimes it requires a change to FusionForge, 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 ?Alioth/FAQ.


?CategoryAlioth | CategoryPermalink