Hi all,

As we have known for some time now, the BuildStream project will be
moving to GitHub.

Since we are in the holiday season and we are confident that it will
not be disruptive, we are going to do our best to push this over the
line during this lull, and kick off 2021 development using a github
workflow.

Migration plan
--------------
Chandan made a lot of progress some months ago to get CI mostly working
in github[0].

Tom Pollard, Douglas Winship, Chris Polin and I took another crack at
it last month and we've ironed out most of the creases to our
satisfaction.

This mostly includes solving the release process and the problem
of automatically publishing documentation of prior releases.

We created a writeup of our plan to perform the migration here[1].


What are we migrating ?
-----------------------
We plan to migrate the following repositories to the apache namespace
in github, at https://github.com/apache/.

* The main BuildStream core repository
  https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/

* The repository which generates the website
  https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/website/

* The repository which aggregates and publishes docs for released
  versions of BuildStream
  https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/docs-website/

There are no plans to migrate the plugin repositories at this time.

While we may end up creating some new plugin specific repositories on
github in the future, we expect mainly to continue to use gitlab for
plugin repositories in the long term, this will be easier for plugin
maintainers to release asynchronously from core BuildStream and with a
bit less bureaucracy.


BuildStream first
-----------------
We have recently acquired https://github.com/apache/buildstream/ for
our purposes to migrate the core BuildStream repository.

All three repositories will not be migrated in one go, BuildStream will
be migrated first.


Loss
----
Things may be a bit shaky for a time, there will be some minor loss in
the migration, but we've tested the migration and we're confident that
loss is minimal.

For example, some things like already merged/closed merge requests may
not be migrated as pull requests, and comments and issues will not
automatically be assigned to your corresponding username on github.

Thanks to Douglas's scripting we have managed to preserve references to
gitlab usernames referred to in comments: links to users in historical
issues and merge requests will refer to users on gitlab, and not users
which might not exist on github, or might exist but not be the same
person.

Some of the CI will have to be revived post migration, mostly this is
limited to remote execution testing - we have agreed to address this
after the migration.


Summary
-------
With any luck, we will get this done swiftly by the time people start
coming back to work in 2021, and I hope to see you all next year on
github :)

I will be periodically replying to this thread to announce timeframes
as I coordinate with Apache folks and sort out permissions and such.

And of course, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !!

Cheers,
    -Tristan


[0]: 
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r229ff54d163389b3e8e42688174336117a139fad9fd63d034db1cc23%40%3Cdev.buildstream.apache.org%3E
[1]: https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/-/wikis/GitHubMigration


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