Gitea instance update information

I took the decision to move the zxq Gitea Instance to GitLab. This will provide better development support for my personal projects, which is the main reason why I’m switching the software, as well as hopefully all of you.

Timeline

• 23/11 00:00 UTC: the instance will be temporarily unavailable, and the data will be moved to the GitLab instance. The instance will live at https://lab.zxq.co temporarily. Users are encouraged in these two days to move important breaking data to lab.zxq.co.
• 25/11 00:00 UTC: Gitea will be moved to https://tea.zxq.co and GitLab will be moved to https://zxq.co . Users can still access their accounts on Gitea and move any information that was lost. Redirects resulting in 404 on GitLab are tried for Gitea.
• 12/12 00:00 UTC, for 24 hours: in this timeframe, the Gitea instance will be disabled, in order to alert any users using webhooks that the old site is going to be removed (assuming they have set up alerts for 404s).
• 11/01 00:00 UTC: Gitea will be turned off. The data will first be kept on the servers for another few months, then will be archived on a long-term storage solution for three years in case anything is needed.
• At a certain point, I’ll crawl the website using Heritrix and will upload the public repository data and documentation to the Internet Archive.

Limitations to the migration

The migration is meant to keep the vital information of the service (which is to say, basically, the code and the ownership rules). This means:

• Pull requests code information will not be kept. (Pull requests, and their discussions, will be kept.) Note that there are only 5 open pull requests at this moment, so migrating them manually does not face a challenge.
• Stars and follows will not be kept.
• Membership of organizations of which you’re not an owner will not be kept.
• Avatars will not be kept.
• Attachments will not be kept.
• Milestones and labels will not be kept. (Nobody is really using issues on zxq seriously anyway).
• Wikis will not be kept, but they do not face a challenge to migrate, so you can do that on your own.
• Users which have not really contributed anywhere will not be kept. (Just push a commit anywhere to make sure this doesn’t happen.)
• Emails other than the main emails will not be kept.
• RSA keys WILL be kept; GPG keys, however, will not. Deploy keys may be kept

Post-migration considerations

As part of this migration, registration is being kept open to allow all users to contribute to projects through issues and pull requests. For this reasons, repository creation is also being kept open, however going forward zxq is not meant to be a public code hosting service. The reasoning is simple: being a public code hosting service comes with maintenance costs and is prone to be scaled. Maintenance is even the simple “managing spam” side of things. For this reason, CI minutes will not be given for users outside the “common” existing users of zxq (ie. the Ripple team). Other limitations will be put in place, probably regarding Group/organization creation and repository size (although they will be better figured out as we go).

If, nonetheless, you can’t be bothered to set up your own GitLab/Gitea instance, shoot me an email at the@howl.moe (even if I don’t know you) so that I can grant you access to the features. My hope is that in the next 5 years forgefed could become a thing (note: people saying that git is already distributed & federated and that there is no need for an ActivityPub implementation miss the point. Git is not for command line nerds only, because GitHub has made it correctly a software for everyone).