Fedora Hosted

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

~ the obit ~

Fedora Hosted was set up in late 2007, when a Linux distribution still needed to run its own forge. It handed Fedora-adjacent projects a Trac instance, a repository in git or svn or hg, a mailing list and a download area, all wired into Fedora Account System groups so the login you already had was the login you used.

By the end it was a record of its own decisions. Trac 0.12, with upstream long since gone past it, and RHEL 6 underneath. Nothing managed by Ansible and nothing distributed. Fedora's infrastructure team wrote all of that onto the retirement page themselves, which is more candor than most shutdown notices bother with.

I never had an account there. For anyone working on Linux from outside the Red Hat orbit, fedorahosted.org was a hostname you arrived at from the bottom of a bug report, read once and left. That is what most forges are to most people: somebody else's ticket, reached sideways through a search engine.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why there were two ~

The replacement, pagure.io, came up in early 2015, written from the ground up for the git pull-request workflow that GitHub had made the default. For about a year Fedora ran both of them. In early 2016 the infrastructure team concluded it could not keep maintaining the pair, and the one with a decade of accumulated debt was the one that went.

The traffic made the call easy. The sunset post counts one new project added in 2016 and a handful the year before. New work had already gone elsewhere; what sat on fedorahosted.org was old work that still needed somewhere to live.

~ the sunset note ~

The announcement went up on the Fedora Community Blog on 7 September 2016 with a date attached: 28 February 2017. That is close to eighteen months of warning, and it came with a tool: pagure-importer would carry Trac tickets across into pagure issues, and git repositories were a push away. Maintainers were told to move to pagure.io or anywhere else that suited them.

The retirement page records the actual end as 1 March 2017.

~ what survived ~

Mailing lists were explicitly exempted, and lists.fedorahosted.org kept running past the shutdown. For the code, Fedora offered raw tarballs of any public project on request, with the stated condition that they would not be hosted forever and that extracting anything useful was your problem. The hostname still redirects today, to the retirement page itself, which makes it a shutdown notice being served nine years after the shutdown.

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