[ocaml-infra] Fwd: Github down again

Fri Nov 1 10:56:12 GMT 2013

On 1 Nov 2013, at 10:41, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).

This is correct -- I want a longer term mirror that'll stick around for
published code even if the upstream disappears for whatever reason.

I view the Forge much like GitHub -- a development environment, and I
don't want to intertwine them for this reason.

> 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.)

In the long term, yes, but in the short-term, we gain a lot from the
network effort of GitHub.  We've got various projects on the boil
that'll ensure we don't stay locked into GitHub forever, though.

-anil

> 
> 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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