blog about the gitolite migration

so i've finished migrating all our git repositories to gitlab!

this is a multi-year project that is finally concluding. such an epic thing deserves a wider audience, even if only because i actually wrote code for this that might be useful for others. but also because i'm about to destroy a lot of data and while i have good confidence I have copied everything over to gitlab fairly reliably, having more eyeballs on this wouldn't hurt.

also, people need to change their URLs and everything...

so, our audience is:

1. power users and packages that clone from source to build their stuff: need to change your URLs!
2. tor developer community: your code has moved! make sure nothing was destroyed! backups will be kept for a year, etc
3. other sysadmins considering the move: make a flag day before people start moving over, use this script in any case, but it needs modifications
4. archivists: sorry, too late for a last crawl, but software heritage and archiveteam got our backs

@pavel would there be a good/bad time for this? hoping to publish something about in the coming days.

a copy of this post would be sent to tor-project to wrap all this up.

thanks!

notes to self, things to mention:

• https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/
• https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/gitolite-admin
• fabric-tasks
• tpo/tpa/team#41215 (closed)
• https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-36-gitolite-gitweb-retirement
• tpo/tpa/team#40472 (closed) (rfc issue, june 2020, 4 years old!)
• possible data loss in redirections for existing repos, assumed safe
• possible data loss in user redirections, in particular
• clones were done on sometimes wild guess, sometimes first alphabetical position gets to be the root of the tree
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=642504
• this:

root@bungei:~# atq
124	Fri Jul 25 05:25:00 2025 a root