[ocaml-infra] Fwd: Github down again

[Gabriel Scherer]

I think Anil's idea is not to provide an active place where people can
work on a given project (like the forge or Github), but a still place
that exposes the state of development of some projects that are
developed *elsewhere*. The counterpart, for versioned source code, of
what a read-only mailing-list archive is with respect to the actual
mailing-list server.

If you take the OCaml compiler/distribution for example, a lot of the
development is happening on the official SVN, and people also have
forks spread in decentralized systems, but if I want to point someone
to a specific commit or part of the source code, one solution today is
to use the github.org/ocaml/ocaml mirror (whose interface is
admittedly more convenient than the webSVN stuff available on the
official SVN). Having a git.ocaml.org/ocaml could replace github for
that need (but there wouldn't be any development happening there).

Something I'm personally wondering about is whether gitlab could also
be used to support the git-based workflows that surround opam,
ocamlot, etc. That's sensibly harder as this does require interaction,
and I can undertand that Anil, that has invested significant time to
learn github's scripting API, would not be keen on moving to a
different platform that could remain technically subpar for a long
time. (And keeping both in sync. would probably be a pain.)

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Sylvain Le Gall
<sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net>
> Date: 2013/11/1
> Subject: Re: [ocaml-infra] Github down again
> To: Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>
>
>
> 2013/11/1 Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>:
>> I'm a little confused -- the intention behind git.ocaml.org is to act
>> as a mirror for major OCaml repositories, so putting a dependency on Forge
>> doesn't seem right.  What's the goal of the scripts you are talking about
>> below?
>>
>> I'm thinking that we simply specify a list of Git URLs somewhere, and
>> they are picked up by git.ocaml.org to publish as a mirror.  That could
>> include a list exported by the Forge of its projects (that use Git), as
>> well as others on GitHub.
>>
>
> Having a project on the forge will provide:
> - a public list of member of the project (i.e. you know who to ping
> when there is a problem)
> - maintenance of the system hosting your project will be taken care by
> someone else (including e.g. backup, system upgrade)
> - adding a member to the project will be easier (vs if you are hosting
> this on your host, you will have to create a user + add his ssh key)
>
> What is precisely git.ocaml.org ?
>
> If this is a VM or a physical host, I think you will slightly increase
> the TCO of *.ocaml.org. If this is a virtual host inside OCamlLab, you
> may have concern to add external contributor. The benefit to have it
> separate is that if github and the OCaml forge will be down at the
> same time, you still have no problem.
>
> But all in all, the benefit of hosting it on the forge is not huge,
> this may just be convenient for allowing other people to take care of
> it and getting rid of some system maintainance. So I am not pushing
> hard on this, I just think it is a good idea.
>
> The scheme to synchronize will be the same in both case (cronjob +
> list of url + a shell script).
>
> Does it make sense to you ?
>
>> -anil
>>
>> On 31 Oct 2013, at 13:21, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I think the best place to have this kind of mirror is in Forge (but I
>>> think you agree if I understand you correctly).
>>>
>>> Proposal:
>>> - create a forge.ocamlcore.org project called "github-mirror"
>>> - have a main git repository (in github or in the forge) that contains
>>> a file "github-url-to-mirror"
>>>
>>> In a cronjob on ssh.ocamlcore.org:
>>> - checkout the main git repository
>>> - loop over the entries of github-url-to-mirror and check them out in
>>> /home/group/github-mirror/gitroot/
>>>
>>> For the nice GitLab interface, contact me so that we can install the
>>> required DB and ruby packages. However you'll probably have to install
>>> gitlab by yourself, except if you know where I can find a debian
>>> package for it, and point it to /home/group/github-mirror/gitroot...
>>>
>>> User signup -> agree that it should be disabled.
>>>
>>> Does it make sense ?
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Sylvain
>>>
>>>
>>> 2013/10/31 Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>:
>>>> I took a quick shot a trying out GitLab to act as a mirror.  This is *very* experimental, but here's what it looks like on git.ocaml.org:
>>>>
>>>> http://git.ocaml.org/ocaml-compiler/ocaml/commits/master
>>>> (I didn't set this up on a staging domain due to the pain of reconfiguration).
>>>>
>>>> There's only one project on there at a moment: a static checkout of the OCaml Git mirror, but I can script up a proper GitHub/Forge mirror quite easily from this.  I'm inclined to disable user signups for this and make it a pure mirror, though.
>>>>
>>>> -anil
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Infrastructure mailing list
>>>> Infrastructure at lists.ocaml.org
>>>> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/infrastructure
>>>
>>
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