[kde-community] Sunsetting of Infrastructure and the Phabricator migration

[Ben Cooksley]

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Hi all,

As you'll all be aware we are currently in the process of overhauling
our Git infrastructure, and replacing numerous elements of it.

The first part of this will take place this weekend - with
projects.kde.org being shutdown. All Git repository browsing from that
point on should take place through quickgit.kde.org. commits.kde.org
will also be reconfigured to redirect you exclusively to
quickgit.kde.org.

As a result the tree structure will only be available from the XML
file from this point onward. There are no plans to replicate the tree
structure within Phabricator (although some of the grouping it
facilitates may be provided through a different mechanism)

The XML file upon which numerous utilities (including kdesrc-build)
depend will continue to be made available. It will instead be
generated by a Python script periodically, based on the contents of a
Git repository.

In terms of Reviewboard, there are no plans to import it's contents
into Phabricator, as the level of effort required is too high. Once we
are migrated to Phabricator for reviews, i'm proposing that everyone
has 4 weeks to finish any final reviews up within Reviewboard before
it is set to read only by disabling login for everyone. Reviews still
open at that point would be discarded.

The contents of Kanboard will be migrated into Phabricator, more
details will come on that over the next few weeks, including details
of any action people needs to take. As an immediate measure it would
be appreciated if people could conduct a general cleanup and remove
tasks and boards they have no intention of using or revisiting in the
future. Following this migration Kanboard will be shutdown.

In terms of repositories, now would be a good time to look into the
scratch and clone repositories you have on git.kde.org and perform a
cleanup of any repositories which are unused, not useful or are
otherwise no longer needed.

We will be looking into how to import our repositories into
Phabricator which will include all scratch and clone repositories.
This means the entire content of these repositories will be indexed,
and reducing the number of repositories will reduce the amount of
indexing work which Phabricator needs to complete.

I should also note that as a side affect of the Phabricator
transition, scratch/clone repositories will to a certain extent cease
to exist - everything will now be a mainline repository. As a
consequence force pushes will be disabled for all repositories as part
of the migration (including scratch repositories). We will be creating
a mechanism which will allow repositories following certain naming
conventions to be easily created by developers (although this will
have to be done through the web interface).

As part of the capabilities of Phabricator, sysadmin will also be
extending the power to create general purpose mainline repositories
(and certain other actions within Phabricator) to a number of
community members. They will be contacted individually over the next
month or two regarding this.

Comments on the above are welcome (little is in concrete yet), please
start them in appropriate sub-threads on kde-core-devel (to minimize
cross-posting, etc).

Thanks,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin