[tor-project] Trac to Gitlab Migration Information

[Alexander Færøy]

# tl;dr

Trac is retiring; we're moving to gitlab.  We wanted to do this in a
more elegant way, but we're low on resources, and there are going to be
some bumps in the road here.

If you use or engage with the Tor bugtracking system or our wiki, this
email may be relevant to you.  If you don't, you can stop reading now.

# Why migrate?

We're hoping gitlab will be a good fit because:

* Gitlab will allow us to collect our different engineering tools into a
  single application: Git repository handling, Wiki, Issue tracking,
  Code reviews, and project management tooling.
* Gitlab is well-maintained.
* Gitlab will allow us to build a more modern approach to handling CI for
  our different projects. This is going to happen after the ticket and wiki
  migration.

(Note that we're only planning to install and use the freely licensed version
of gitlab.  There is an "enterprise" version with additional features, but we
prefer to use free software whenever possible.)

# What's the plan?

On Friday June 12th, we're going to put trac into read-only mode.  You'll be
able to read trac, but not make any changes to it.  That's when we'll start
migrating to gitlab.

We have been doing a bunch of trial migrations and we may need to do a few more
until we get it right. We anticipate that gitlab will be pretty unstable over
the weekend. We hope we'll be in a stable position on Tuesday, and our gitlab
installation will be open for people to use it. It will be up on
https://gitlab.torproject.org

This won't be as smooth a process as we would like: we're going to lose some
features -- but, no data. In the coming weeks, we're going to try to put extra
time aside to fix whatever issues come up.

We are migrating tickets and wiki from Trac into Gitlab issues and wiki. We
will continue having https://git.torproject.org/ as canonical git server.
People will be able to move repos into gitlab whenever they are ok with it.

# What will break, and when will you fix it?

Most notably, we're going to have an interruption in the ability to open new
accounts and new tickets.  We _did not_ want to migrate without a solution
here; we'll try to have at least a stop-gap solution in place soon, and
something better in the future.  For now, we're planning for people that want
to get a new account please send a mail to <gitlab-admin at torproject.org>. We
hope to have something else in place once the migration is succesful.

We're not going to migrate long-unused accounts.

Some wiki pages that contained automated listings of tickets will stop
containing those lists: that's a trac feature that gitlab doesn't have. We'll
have to adjust our workflows to work around this. In some cases, we can use
gitlab milestone pages or projects that do not need a wiki page as a work
around.

# What will keep working the same as in Trac?

We're not going to throw away any ticket data; it'll all be migrated on the new
system. We're going to try to keep most old URLs working on systems such as
https://bugs.torproject.org/

All existing tickets will keep their current numbers.

# How can I...

... report an issue in Tor software?

For now, just use one of the mailing lists, if it can't wait till the
bugtracker is open again. tor-dev at lists.torproject.org is the best mailing list
to use for now.

... report an issue in the bugtracker itself?

Please hold off till the migration is finished. At that point you can email
<gitlab-admin at torproject.org>.

... fix a bug?

If you have a patch you want to make sure we know about, and it can't
wait till the bugtracker is open again, please use one of the mailing
lists: tor-dev at lists.torproject.org would be best.

... get an account if I'm already an active contributor?

Please send a mail to <gitlab-admin at torproject.org>. We hope to have something
else in place once the migration is successful.

All the best,
The Gitlab migration folks

-- 
Alexander Færøy