a place called home

Since summer we have worked on our git.debian.org replacement based on GitLab. I am really happy to say that we are launching the beta of our service today. Please keep in mind that it is a beta, we don’t expect any database resets, but under unexpected circumstances it might still happen.

The new service is available at https://salsa.debian.org. Every active Debian Developer already has an account. Please request a password reset via https://salsa.debian.org/users/sign_in – your login is either your Debian login or Debian e-mail address.

Guest users

External users are invited to create an account on salsa. To avoid clashes with future Debian Developers, we are enforcing a ‘-guest’ suffix for any guest username. Therefore we developed a self-service portal which allows non-Debian Developers to sign up, available at https://signup.salsa.debian.org. Please keep in mind that your username will have ‘-guest’ appended.

Project creation

Every user can create projects in their own namespace (similar to GitHub).

Teams

For larger projects you can also create a group to host your projects. To avoid clashes with usernames (that share the same namespace as groups) we are requiring groups to have a ‘-team’ suffix to their name. Groups can be created using the same self-service portal https://signup.salsa.debian.org. For larger, already-established teams it is also possible to ask us to create the group with a name not conforming to the normal team namespace. Examples are teams like debian-qa. Please create an issue in the support project.

Collab-maint

If you want to allow other Debian Developers to work on your packages or software, you can create projects within the Debian group. Every Debian Developer has write access to projects created in this group. If you create a project within the Debian group, you are implicitly welcoming all DDs to contribute directly to the project.

Guest users can only be added to individual projects with the Debian group, but not to the entire Debian group. This is different to the policy for the collab-maint group on Alioth.

GitLab runners

We won’t provide any shared Gitlab runners for now. If you want to sponsor resources for such runners please contact us.

Gitlab pages

We will support Gitlab pages in the future, but more work is needed first. We will post an update when they are ready.

Migration of repositories

We don’t plan to do any automatic migration of alioth repositories. If you use a repository and think it is important (!) migrate it on your own. We will provide a read-only export of all repositories that weren’t exported after disabling alioth.

Timeline

We want to run this beta at least for four weeks. If everything goes well we intend to leave beta around the end of January.

Documentation

Documentation of the service will happen in the Debian Wiki. Please feel free to enhance the documentation. See also the upstream GitLab docs.

Getting help

If you have problems with the service you can reach us:

• IRC: #alioth@irc.debian.org
• Mailing list: https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/alioth-staff-replacement
• Issue tracker: https://salsa.debian.org/salsa/support/issues

Don’t expect us to be responsive during the holidays, so be patient :).

Request for help

If you want to take part in salsa administration please get in touch with us. We want to have at least two more administrators for the Gitlab instance.