Alioth

» see alioth.debian.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A distribution the size of Debian is mostly not software. It is tens of thousands of packages, each one a small body of work about somebody else's software: patches, build rules, a changelog, an argument in a bug report about whether a default should change. All of that has to live somewhere with version control and a mailing list and a permission model, and in March 2003 Debian announced where. The post to debian-devel-announce on 29 March was titled "Introducing Alioth: SourceForge for Debian", which is a title that tells you exactly what year it was written in.

The plan at first was to run the SourceForge codebase itself. Two weeks later a follow-up explained the switch to GForge, the free software fork, on the grounds that somebody had already done the work of stripping the SourceForge branding out and there was no reason to do it twice. GForge grew into FusionForge, which Alioth moved to in 2009, and that is what it ran for its last nine years. Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas were among the people who kept it alive.

Most of what it hosted was Debian packaging teams, but not all. SANE lived there, the scanner layer that most Linux desktops still depend on, and so did a long tail of projects that simply wanted a forge run by people they trusted. For fifteen years, if you followed a Debian bug far enough upstream you eventually landed on an alioth.debian.org URL, usually one with a slightly dated page layout and a Subversion repository behind it.

~ the dossier ~

~ its dead jim ~

The end was announced by the man who did the work, and the mail is short enough to quote most of. Alexander Wirt wrote on the evening of 5 June 2018 that after more than two years of preparation, alioth was history. He had finished archiving every version-control repository the day before. SSH logins were off as of that message, and if you discovered something missing and it was really urgent you were invited to get in touch with him directly. The virtual machine would be shut down and deleted in a few days. Then a short list of what remained to do, a thanks to two other admins, and "Thats it folks".

He signed it "Alex - former alioth admin", which he had been for about ninety minutes at that point.

~ the archive ~

Debian handled the aftermath better than almost anybody does. alioth-archive.debian.org still answers today with the releases and the old repositories frozen in place. The redirector that maps old anonscm.debian.org paths to their new homes was handed to the system administration team rather than switched off, and anonscm.debian.org still resolves eight years later. Projects that wanted to carry on got imported into salsa.debian.org, which is a normal GitLab and is where Debian development happens now.

The cost of a forge dying is usually every link anyone ever wrote to it. Here the links mostly still work, because somebody treated the redirect map as part of the shutdown rather than as somebody else's problem.

~ from outside the project ~

I have run Debian and Debian derivatives for most of my working life without ever having commit access to any of this. Alioth was infrastructure for the few thousand people who maintain the thing, and the rest of us only saw it as a hostname in a bug thread, which is the normal relationship between a user and a distribution's internals. Worth noticing anyway: Debian built and ran its own forge for fifteen years at a time when the obvious move was to put everything on somebody else's servers, and when it finally gave that up it moved to self-hosted GitLab rather than to GitHub.

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