Migrate away from Gitorious before its May 2015 shutdown

[Aaron Wells]

GitLab has aquired Gitorious and will shut the site down at the end of May 2015: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/03/gitlab-acquires-gitorious/

"Starting today, Gitorious.org users can import their existing projects into GitLab.com by clicking the “Import projects from Gitorious.org” link when creating a new project. Gitorious.org will stay online until the end of May 2015 to give people time to migrate their repositories. Existing users of Gitorious on-premises can contact <email address hidden> for more information."

Mahara's "official" main code repository is still on Gitorious, as are many of our utility repositories (the manual, deployment scripts, etc). We also have scripts that reference the gitorious address, and project listings that tell people to access our source code at gitorious. Apparently all of this will need to change before the end of May.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I've taken the step of importing all our Gitorious repositories into Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/groups/mahara

We'll need to discuss at the next developer meeting whether we want to use Gitlab as the replacement for Gitorious, or whether we want to find a different service to use.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Here's the replacement strategy we've decided on.

1. The "official" Mahara source code repository, will be the gitlab instance of the New Zealand Open Source Society: https://git.nzoss.org.nz/groups/mahara

2. Accordingly, we'll set up reviews.mahara.org to replicate to git.nzoss.org.nz, and we will also set up our automated tools to use that URL in the places where they currently use gitorious (for instance in the automated commit messages that get sent to Launchpad).

3. We will continue to also replicate the Mahara source code to Github.com, and maybe to Gitlab.com as well, as a sort of community outreach.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Also, Gitorious has announced that the site will be going "read-only" on May 15: http://blog.gitorious.org/2015/04/15/gitorious-org-is-dead-long-live-gitorious-org/

So we need to migrate everything away, and put up a message saying that the gitorious repositories are defunct, by May 15. Rather than putting up a link to the git.nzoss.org.nz domain name, I think the message should probably just direct people back to mahara.org, where they can click around to find out the latest official source code repository. So that in case we need to move again in the future, we can.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Our replacement strategy has shifted to the following:

1. We're going to set up a git repository at git.mahara.org. For the time being, this will be a gitlab instance hosted by Catalyst IT. Potentially we could change this to other software in the future, but the important thing is that if it's under the "git.mahara.org" domain, then if we do need to change things in the future, we can do so without having to direct people to a new address.

2. We're also going to continue to mirror the Mahara source code to gitlab.com, github.com, and git.nzoss.org.nz (and potentially other code sharing websites).

3. Until git.mahara.org is ready (which should be in the next week or two), we'll use git.nzoss.org.nz as our official git repository.

4. I have deleted all the Mahara projects from gitorious, and replaced them with a placeholder message telling people to go to https://mahara.org to find out the new code location. This was done so that any automated scripts that are reading from the gitorious repository, will fail loudly, rather than silently continue to read the old code (assuming that gitorious does go into read-only mode and continues to server everything from the same old address. The details on the read-only announcement were vague.)

5. I left the mahara-contrib project in place on gitorious, though, because that contains code contributed by third-parties, and I don't want to tell them all to move everything.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Patch for master: https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/4760/

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/4760
Committed: https://git.nzoss.org.nz/mahara/mahara/commit/1e5f6645d32f624676a11f1d60bb6584f6f7c7df
Submitter: Robert Lyon (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit 1e5f6645d32f624676a11f1d60bb6584f6f7c7df
Author: Aaron Wells <email address hidden>
Date: Wed May 13 11:01:53 2015 +1200

Removing gitorious references from source code

Bug 1430567

Change-Id: I839f40c00117a6ba798e6060b1bacaf1afe69bd9