Gitea Diaries: Part 3

This is the last chapter of the Gitea Diaries series, as we are approaching the end of our journey! As a reminder, the goal of this project is to migrate all ongoing activities and data hosted on developer.blender.org (Phabricator) to a new portal, powered by Gitea. 

At the end of 2022, Arnd provided an update on the state of the Phabricator to Gitea migration project. While a lot of documentation and progress happened, much was left to be done. So we decided to assemble a task force to execute the project as quickly and efficiently as possible and wrap it up during the month of January.

Here are some key decisions that were confirmed in order to proceed with the migration.

Accounts and Blender ID

Blender ID will be the only user authentication system used for the new portal.

All users will be migrated across portals. Since developer.blender.org did not require a Blender ID account in order to log in, some users might not have one. In this case, a Blender ID will be created for them during the migration. Gitea usernames will be defined by the Blender ID account nickname. For newly created accounts, we will try to match your username on developer.blender.org as closely as possible. For already-existing accounts, the Blender ID nickname will be left as-is. A support channel to handle account migration issues will be available when the new portal goes live.

Preparing for the migration

If you are a Blender contributor, and committed code, reported issues, or participated in discussions on developer.blender.org, you can help with the migration of your account.

If you already have a Blender ID account:

• ensure that your verified Blender ID email address matches your primary, verified address on developer.blender.org (click on your name -> Settings -> Email Addresses in left column to check and change)
• ensure that your real name on developer.blender.org and your nickname on your Blender ID is set to your liking. That info will be used on Gitea by the Phabricator-to-Gitea migration.

If you don’t have a Blender ID account yet one will be created during the migration.

• ensure your primary, verified email and real name on developer.blender.org are correct.

Task management and archival

All issues and related information will be migrated as accurately as possible. This includes discussions and attached files. 

Differential revisions will not be migrated. Any module or contributor who wishes to have their patches reviewed should submit them again through the new Pull Request system. All existing review threads on developer.blender.org will be baked into static HTML files and made available through archive.blender.org. This way it will be possible to look up Differential revisions after Phabricator is decommissioned.

Content organization

Project data will be re-organized to fit the Organization → Repository → Tasks/Projects/Labels data hierarchy available in Gitea. This will be quite intuitive to many people, since Gitea provides a user experience very similar to GitHub and GitLab. However, the meaning of some terms will change. For example, while on developer.blender.org “projects” were used for many different functions, projects in Gitea are only used  for organizing issues within the context of a repository. 

Timeline

A dream team composed by Arnd, Brecht, Danny, Sergey, and Sybren, with support from Thomas, Pablo, and Philipp, in collaboration with members of the Gitea project, is working hard to make this happen – next week! More details and docs will be available in a follow-up blogpost and on wiki.blender.org. Stay tuned.