[sane-devel] [janitorial] Relocating the SANE Project

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Dear all,

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Since 2003-09-06, the SANE Project has been kindly hosted on Debian's
Alioth.  The Debian project has deprecated[1] this service and intends
to discontinue[*] it when Debian Wheezy becomes EOL.  While that seems
to be slated[2] for 2018-05-31, the Alioth wiki page's News[3] section
states 2018-05-01 for Alioth itself and 2018-02-01 for mailing lists.

 [*]: It is not quite clear what that exactly entails but at best the
      service will become read-only.

A Debian-backed GitLab-based replacement has been announced[4] in beta
and it looks like there may be a temporary continuation of the mailing
lists[5] but *nothing* will be migrated automatically.  Everything has
to be done explicitly.

That is, if we don't act, the SANE Project will no longer be able to:

 - communicate via the mailing lists
 - push commits to its official git repositories
 - update the bug and feature requests trackers
 - update its website

So we have to move some place else for our project hosting but where?

The Debian-backed GitLab-based replacement[6] is one option.  Two others
are GitLab.com[7] and GitHub.com[8].  None of these provides support for
mailing lists so we need something else for that.  Migrating to Debian's
temporary continuation is one option.  Any other suggestions?  As for
the website, all three (will) have support for *static* webpages.  The
trackers are covered by the issue systems of all three.

 [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#Deprecation_of_Alioth
 [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
 [3]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#News
 [4]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/12/msg00003.html
 [5]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/MailingListContinuation
 [6]: https://salsa.debian.org
 [7]: https://gitlab.com
 [8]: https://github.com

You may remember that I set up an *unofficial* SANE Project group[9] on
GitLab.com to play around with GitLab CI that mirrors the project's git
repositories on Alioth.  We could use that.  I have also created a stub
on GitHub.com[10] and two on Debian's GitLab[11][12] (which enforces a
*-team naming convention for groups :-() to reserve the names.

 [9]: https://gitlab.com/sane-project
 [10]: https://github.com/sane-project
 [11]: https://salsa.debian.org/sane-team
 [12]: https://salsa.debian.org/sane-project-team

I am personally in favour of using something we could in principle run
ourselves.  That would rule out GitHub.com.  Also, it is not clear yet
when website hosting becomes possible or to what extent Debian's GitLab
instance will provide CI runners (needed to publish the website), so
*my* preference is GitLab.com (steering clear of its enterprise-only
functionality).

What are your preferences?  Feel free to mention other options.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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