Debian Developers - alioth is dead.

Author

alioth is dead.

Joey Hess

2004-03-22, 2:34 pm

Since d-i moved to alioth after the Debian server compromise we have had:

1. A dead power supply, and the machine down for several days.
2. A hasty and badly executed move to a new machine, in which the first
replacement machine didn't work, and so alioth was hopped to yet
another one.
During this move, basic services like subversion, lists, and email
were offline for most of a week. Some repositories even lost commits
because they were moved in the wrong order.
3. When d-i transitioned to subversion, we discovered that alioth's svn
was unable to scale up to any serious level of activity. We found
numerous races in the hackish cron jobs that tried to work around
the design flaws in alioth's permissions system for subversion.
4. Today, alioth's root partition is full. Its database is offline. Its
server cert has apparently expired. viewcvs is broken for subversion,
as is browsing with apache, as is anonymous svn. Its web interface is
down.

It's clear to me that alioth is not being sufficiently maintained, and
that continuing to use it is not sustainable if this goes on.

Before the d-i project goes off and finds our own machine to host our
repository on, I just want to know if there is are any general plans to
either set up a new general hosting service for Debian, or possibly
maintain alioth again.

--
see shy jo

Branden Robinson

2004-03-23, 12:34 am

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 01:31:21PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> viewcvs is broken for subversion,

Well, I wouldn't hold the alioth admins 100% responsible for *that*.

I've been told there's a trivial patch to get ViewCVS working with
Subversion 1.0.0, but the viewcvs package maintainer has not done an
upload in quite some time (14 Sep 2003).

--
G. Branden Robinson | The Bible is probably the most
Debian GNU/Linux | genocidal book ever written.
branden@debian.org | -- Noam Chomsky
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

Tollef Fog Heen

2004-03-23, 10:36 am

* Branden Robinson

| I've been told there's a trivial patch to get ViewCVS working with
| Subversion 1.0.0, but the viewcvs package maintainer has not done an
| upload in quite some time (14 Sep 2003).

Thanks to branden for the 3-day DELAYED NMU which should fix this:

: tfheen@gluck ~ $ cat DELAYED/3-day/viewcvs*changes
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
[snip]
Changes:
viewcvs (0.9.2+cvs.1.0.dev.2003.08.26-1.1) unstable; urgency=low

Josselin Mouette

2004-03-23, 11:38 am

Le lun 22/03/2004 à 19:31, Joey Hess a écrit :
> 3. When d-i transitioned to subversion, we discovered that alioth's svn
> was unable to scale up to any serious level of activity. We found
> numerous races in the hackish cron jobs that tried to work around
> the design flaws in alioth's permissions system for subversion.

We're beginning to face the same issues with the pkg-gnome repository.
Today, it was locked up only a few minutes after the admins killed the
cron job which had been locking it for 30 hours.

Would it be possible to make svn.debian.org run over WebDAV instead of
svn+ssh? This way is more scalable, and recommended for large
repositories.
--
.''`. Josselin Mouette /\./\
: :' : josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org
`. `' joss@debian.org
`- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom

Ondøej Surý

2004-03-23, 11:38 am

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 16:03, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Would it be possible to make svn.debian.org run over WebDAV instead of
> svn+ssh? This way is more scalable, and recommended for large
> repositories.

I am using subversion for long time now, I using svn-dav locks
repository too when commiting many files (or many data). But I haven't
tried this with 1.0.1.

We solved it by migrating to svnserver, but we run it only in intranet
setup...

O.
--
Ondøej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>

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