[Openstack-devel] Moving all git repositories to git.gplhost.com

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi,

For many reasons, I don't believe that Alioth is a good place to host
the packages for OpenStack. Some of the reasons:

- Alioth has been dead for 10+ days, with almost zero communication from
its admins. It is *still* dead as we speak, even though I could get my
files back. I don't want to wait even a single hour, so I moved
everything already...

- Alioth has a fail2ban script which is constantly annoying me when
doing mass-fixes. Asking for a change of this always resulted in a
stupid reply such as that my configuration is wrong (which isn't truth).

- Downloading (eg: git clone) from Alioth is painfully slow. Hosting the
git for OpenStack packages on the same data center as the Jenkins
servers speed up the build process.

- I don't really trust the security model of Alioth, and I prefer to
handle things differently.

- I want to be able to provide shell accounts that *I* manage, and
provide user repositories over ssh whenever asked.

- I prefer to have the root on the server, as it has been painful to
manage unix rights, with un-cooperative Alioth admins especially with
unresponsive team members (asking for a single chmod was too much to
ask...).

- Recent event shows that there was no useful backups on Alioth, which
is very scary (or at least, no backup which I could access, which is
exactly the same).

- I don't want to suffer for more than 48 hours of down time, blocking
my work of packaging.

- Alioth admins aren't receptive to any kind of suggestion, like using a
distributed storage (like Ceph) and the cloud, which would be the
obvious thing to do here (since Alioth is struggling with the load). I
don't want to continue using a server which has a huge load and is not
responsive enough.

- Hosting everything on the same server, I mean the KGB bot and the git
repository, allows me to do more security (nobody with access to Alioth
will be able to read the KGB bot passwords), and to generate the KGB bot
config on the same host, whenever there's a new Git repository, which is
both safer and faster. It took me a few minutes to do it, and I'm happy
with the result.

It is also my view that never, we should have leave Alioth administered
by anyone else but the DSA. Recent event proves it, and that's not the
only time where we had huge down time.

So, you will find all package repositories available with anonymous
checkout (eg: git clone) at:
http://git.gplhost.com/openstack/<package>.git

You can of course browse here:
http://git.gplhost.com/openstack/

There's also a gitweb at:
http://git.gplhost.com/gitweb/

I'm in the process of fixing all VCS fields for all packages, though of
course, fixes will only happen at the next upload of all packages.

If anyone needs a shell account to host a public Git repository, just
let me know, and I'll add a shell account for you. Though I think it's
not really needed. Anyone with a server, ssh access and web access, can
setup a public Git repository. If you don't know how, I've explained
that here:

http://dtcsupport.gplhost.com/Git/Public-Repo-Howto

If you don't have such infrastructure at your disposal, you can always
use something like Github (though I'm not a fan of it because of its
non-free nature).

Then I think the best way forward will be to ask for a pull request on
IRC: just give me your public repository URL, and then I'll just pull
from it. Easy enough...

I hope this solution will satisfy everyone,

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)