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

marked this issue as related to tpo/tpa/team#41215 (closed)

added Next label

assigned to @anarcat

mentioned in issue tpo/tpa/team#41215 (closed)

changed the description

mentioned in issue tpo/tpa/team#41217 (closed)

changed the description

changed the description

added Doing label and removed Next label

marked the checklist item https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/ as completed

marked the checklist item https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/gitolite-admin as completed

marked the checklist item tpo/tpa/team#40472 (closed) (rfc issue, june 2020, 4 years old!) as completed

marked the checklist item possible data loss in redirections for existing repos, assumed safe as completed

marked the checklist item possible data loss in user redirections, in particular as completed

marked the checklist item https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=642504 as completed

marked the checklist item this: as completed

marked the checklist item clones were done on sometimes wild guess, sometimes first alphabetical position gets to be the root of the tree as completed

marked the checklist item https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-36-gitolite-gitweb-retirement as completed

marked the checklist item tpo/tpa/team#41215 (closed) as completed

marked the checklist item fabric-tasks as completed

mentioned in commit 25029266

mentioned in commit fdee08c8

mentioned in merge request !308 (merged)

@pavel ping! when is a good time to publish this? i'm about to wrap up my edits.

looks good to me. whenever you want to publish is fine with me. please ping me when it's online. would love to support with a couple of social posts across platforms.

cool!

do you think we should make a special lead image for this?

If not for this project specifically, it would certainly be nice to have a general lead image for sysadmin/infrastructure-type blog posts.

i did switch the lead to a neato exit sign i found in the assets...

That's a good point. I had Nico create a couple of new lead images last year, but did not think of sysadmin/infrastructure as a category. I'll add it to my wishlist.

But I think, for now, the image that you chose works well.

mentioned in commit d8faf519

marked this issue as related to #40072

mentioned in issue #40072

@pavel this is now deployed to production:

https://blog.torproject.org/gitolite-gitlab-migration/

feel free to share widely!

here's a mastodon post to reboost, in case https://kolektiva.social/@Anarcat/112366421768959691 ... but it links to my personal blog, where i've recopied the blog post.

closed