To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: alioth deprecation notice

Comrades!

tldr: alioth will go away at some point.  A replacement git service
      is being worked on.

Alioth.debian.org has served us for a long time, having been launched
over a decade ago, but unfortunately its time is coming to an end.
There is nobody around who is able and willing to maintain the gforge
component of the current deployment, and the environment it is running
on is still running Debian wheezy and nobody dares to change that.

Accordingly, alioth.debian.org will go away in the not too distant future.

We met this last weekend [sprint] in Hamburg, Germany, to discuss and also
to actively work on a way forward.

Alioth currently is providing several services to the Debian development
community as a whole.  The most relevant of these clearly are git hosting
and mailinglists.

= Git hosting =

As such, we started experimenting with a replacement git service.  The
service - salsa.debian.net - is currently in an experimental phase and is
expected to be able to accomodate all Debian related activities in need of
git hosting.  Expect future mails about this service on a communications
channel near you.

= Mailinglists =

We also considering the future of mailinglists currently hosted on alioth.
It is expected that discussion and user-support lists would be welcome on
lists.debian.org.  Furthermore, the notification features of modern SCV hosting
platforms - such as the upcoming salsa.debian.net - will make many of the
historically relevant commit mailinglists obsolete.  A third big set of
lists appear to be addresses to be used as Maintainer: in packages.  It seems
that these really aren't classic mailinglists (which would be suitable for
lists.debian.org), and that they are instead more like simple aliases, with
few members each, to keep track of incoming bug reports, uploads, etc.
concerning a package.  Maybe a service such as tracker.debian.org would be a
replacement for individuals to get notified about things concerning packages
they care about?

= Other services =

Alioth also provides more services, but it is not clear who, if anybody, is
going to offer publicly and generally available replacements for any of these.
We suggest users of other version control systems move to git once
one (or more) git hosting services are available.  If your team is not able
to migrate for some reason or another, we suggest you get in touch so we
can assist you in finding a replacement for alioth.


[sprint] https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2017/Alioth