Re: Proposal to shutdown pgFoundry

On 05/20/2011 10:15 AM, Dave Page wrote:
> As most of you will know, the pgFoundry system is in dire need of a
> huge amount of work. It's running an extremely old version of GForge,
> which has been hacked about to run on FreeBSD and is almost certainly
> full of potential security issues. In order to bring the system up to
> date we would need to do at least the following:
>
> - Figure out what functionality changes our version has over the latest release.

afaik there are no features in our version that are not in later
versions (or the successor to gforge - that is fusionforge)

>
> - Install the latest version of GForge on our new hosting platform.

fusionforge is packaged

>
> - Re-implement the code changes, if still required.

most of our code changes in the past have been backports of upstream
fixes and security updates

>
> - Figure out how to migrate all the user accounts and related data
> from FreeBSD to Debian.

that's likely quite hard :/

>
> - Figure out how to migrate all the data from the old system to the new.

iirc one of the attempts to migrate resulted in quite a few changes to
fusionforge to fix the upgrade path but it will still be a huge task.

>
> We've had numerous attempts in the past to do this *before* we had the
> new hosting platform, all of which failed miserably, due to the lack
> of people with the time and interest in doing the work.
>
> Following some discussions last night at PGCon, I'd therefore like to
> propose that we deprecate and eventually shutdown the PGFoundry
> service. This would involve:
>
> - Emailing all users with the details of the shutdown timetable.
>
> - Suggest users migrate to GitHub or Sourceforge, depending on their needs.
>
> - Migrate "core" projects (such as psqlODBC and the press/advocacy
> project) to mailing lists in postgresql.org (if required) and to
> git.postgresql.org.
>
> - Offer other users tarballs of their CVS repos, mail archives and downloads.
>
> - After 6 months, shut down the system and permanently archive it.

sounds like the most sensible way forward until somebody can come up
with a very convincing argument on why we should stay in the general
hosting business.

Stefan