[Alioth-staff-replacement] How will Alioth's replacement affect non-Debian projects?

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi all,

The SANE project is a non-Debian project that has been kindly hosted on
Alioth since 2003-09-06.  It is the upstream for Debian's sane-backends
and sane-frontends source packages.  I am one of its project admins (the
other two have been Cc:d) and am mostly doing "janitorial" stuff.

I have been wondering about Alioth's maintenance for a while and just
stumbled upon the replacement plans via the Debian Project News issue of
2017-08-14.  I've read the whole list archive[1] and the LWN article[2].
I have also read all of Alexander's Alioth blog posts[3] and skimmed the
survey results[4].  Too bad I cannot provide my feedback anymore :-(

 [1]: https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/alioth-staff-replacement/
 [2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/724986/
 [3]: http://blog.snow-crash.org/tags/alioth/
 [4]: https://people.debian.org/~formorer/Survey.pdf

## Outline Of Alioth Use

The SANE project has a slightly odd setup in that it is one project with
three git repositories.  We use two trackers and have four mailing lists
(one of which for commit notifications).  We also use the file release
functionality and maintain a website (updated via a cron job) with a CGI
script.  We do not use the roadmap feature.

We rely for a very large part on one of our mailing lists for just about
any kind of communication.  The poor usability of Alioth's trackers may
be responsible for a lot of user support, trouble shooting and debugging
on that list.  The lack of CI has prompted me to set up git repository
mirroring on GitLab.com a while ago but none of that is in any way an
official part of the SANE project.  This was also partly inspired by the
(understandable) lack of tools on Alioth to run things via git hooks and
cron jobs.

As a non-Debian project, the BTS and services like ci.debian.org (which,
IIUC, is meant for Debian packaging efforts) are not an option for us.

## Questions

 0. How will Alioth's replacement affect non-Debian projects?
 1. Will non-Debian projects be welcome on the replacement service?
 2. What kind of time scale are you thinking of for the replacement?

I will be monitoring the list to keep an eye on what's happening and
hope to see feedback from the imminent sprint here as well!

Thanks in advance,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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