[tor-bugs] #30857 [Internal Services/Services Admin Team]: migrate (some projects? everything?) from trac to gitlab

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#30857: migrate (some projects? everything?) from trac to gitlab
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 Reporter:  anarcat                              |          Owner:  (none)
     Type:  project                              |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                               |      Milestone:
Component:  Internal Services/Services Admin     |        Version:
  Team                                           |
 Severity:  Normal                               |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                                       |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:  #29400                               |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by anarcat):

 >  If some folks prefer GitLab that's great! But migrating us away from
 Trac is not a decision to be taken lightly, and requires community buy-in.

 I totally agree. I consider we're at the "feasability study" stage. :)

 >  I was around a decade ago for our migration to Trac, and what you're
 proposing is a big move that impacts us all. Especially if you want to
 propose shutting Trac down without redirects. As I see it there's three
 open questions...

 For the record, I really, really want to have redirects, if we can't
 archive the entire website. I understand it's a solid requirement.

 > 1. Do we want to migrate away from Trac at all?
 > 2. If so, what would we prefer to move to? GitHub? GitLab? Something
 else?
 > 3. What will happen with Trac's ticket and wiki data?

 I think there are some answers to this above, from my perspective, but
 this should definitely be discussed more widely, once we have a clearer
 idea of a possible way forward.

 > This ticket is not the proper place develop consensus on such a large
 move. If you'd care to pursue this I'd suggest...
 >
 > 1. Open the GitLab instance up. I tried to look at
 ​https://dip.torproject.org/ to see what my projects look like on it but
 I'm presented with a login page. As an open source developer this makes it
 DOA right from the starting gate. :)

 It's already kind of open, here: https://dip.torproject.org/explore

 We could improve the splash page, for sure.

 > 2. Begin a thread on tor-project@ to see how the community feels about
 this. I suspect if we move at all folks will prefer GitHub to GitLab, but
 I'm definitely curious to see what people think.

 Hear hear. I'm all for discussing this more widely, but I also think it's
 a good idea to have a plan first.

 I intend to research the topic a little more, maybe do a few actual tests
 (archiving trac into HTML, testing a migration to a test gitlab project or
 fake instance) to see how a migration could look like and/or how much time
 it would take. Then we can come up with something more concrete that
 people will understand better than the current vague idea of where we're
 going. :)

 More concretely, I'm thinking of writing a
 [http://opsreportcard.com/section/9 design doc] for the migration,
 hopefully it will make everything and the options a little more concrete.
 Trac was one of the first thing added to my priority list when I was hired
 at TPI, three months ago, and it's still high on my radar. I haven't had
 any concrete bug reports other than the occasional "trac is slow" which is
 generally transient, so it's hard to figure out what the next step is. But
 people are getting more and more aggravated about the service and I think
 we need to start to think about the exit strategy...

 How does that sound?

 One thing I don't really want is a huge flamewar/bikeshed on this, so i
 think doing this research is definitely useful.

 Also note that this ticket is part of #29400 which explicitely says:

 > We are going to evaluate Gitlab as a replacement for trac, gitweb.tpo,
 git-rw.tpo, github.com.

 Then it is mentioned,
 [https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2019BrusselsAdminTeamMinutes#gitlabservice
 in the brussels admin meeting minutes] that:

 > Some team (snowflake?) to use gitlab exclusively. move (copy + add link
 to gl) existing tickets to gitlab service (not by tsa but by gitlab team)
 >
 > Runners could be provided by anyone. so, it could be done outside of
 tpa/tpo for evaluation, and if we like it in the end we can add some
 runners later.

 So there's a precedent in the idea of migrating at *least* some teams to
 GitLab permanently. I'm taking the next step and asking what's going to
 happen with the rest of trac, because I certainly don't want to keep that
 technical debt around too long. ;)

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30857#comment:18>
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