🔗 Migrating my projects from SourceForge+Subversion to Github+Git

It’s been a while that I’ve been using Git comfortably — even though I still get stumped now and then, the workflow is much better than Subversion. I do finer grained commits with ease and I’m no longer afraid of making branches. Still, some projects of mine are still hosted in svn servers, mostly due to inertia and because they’re mostly single-person projects with the occasional patch and bug report but not much collaboration. For a more “social” project such as LuaRocks, git and Github have proven to be very useful tools.

Farewell to SourceForge

This, however, was the push I needed to move my projects away from SourceForge. From gimp.org:

In the past few months, we have received some complaints about the site where the GIMP installers for the Microsoft Windows platforms are hosted.

SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green “Download here” buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.

The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.

From now on, Jernej Simončič, who provides the installer packages, uploads them to our FTP directly, and from there they will be distributed automatically to our mirrors. Please check Downloads page for updated information. http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net will remain active for the time being and direct users to the new download locations.

This saddens me a lot. I’ve been a SourceForge user for over 13 years. Having my first project there with a “.sourceforge.net” URL was a moment of pride; I felt I was becoming a free software developer “for real”, seeing my code there along with all those other projects I relied on daily, such as GIMP.

htop, in particular, has lived a beautiful life in SourceForge:

It blows my mind to think that these are direct downloads of the source code only. I assume the vast majority of users install htop running the distro package manager (apt-get, yum, etc.) but I have absolutely no way to estimate how many times this program has been installed. And that’s not only okay, it’s beautiful: it’s the nature of free software, the actual freedom, at work. There is no tight grip on users from a central authority, the code is roaming free in what is essentially a network of solidarity. I’ve certainly benefited from this network much more than I’ve contributed to it, but I’m happy to give a small part.

Another achievement I’m very proud of: a perfect 5-star rating score for htop. Surely not that many reviews when compared to really big projects, but it’s noteworthy to me at least, and I’m thankful to everyone who rated.

So, thanks for everything SourceForge, but it looks like it’s time to move on.

Say hello to Github, htop

I’ve already got a bunch of projects in Github so this change should not be traumatic.

I’m converting the repositories to Github and moving the website to my own domain. I’ve started with dit, which is a low-profile project, and everything went smoothly. So it’s time to do the same with htop.

The process is straightforward:

1. Here are the Instructions for importing from Subversion from Github
2. They recommend using svn2git. It took me a few tries to get the conversion perfect. I recommend taking a look at the generated repository with gitk and creating a file called ~/.svn2git/authors containing aliases matching your svn usernames with Github equivalents.

   My authors file looks like this:

   loderunner = Hisham Muhammad <hisham@gobolinux.org>
   hisham = Hisham Muhammad <hisham@gobolinux.org>
   

   And the command-line for svn2git:

   svn2git svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/htop/code/
   

3. The next step was to create a new Github repository. I did that through their web interface.
4. And then, to push the code from the locally generated git repo to Github:

   git remote add origin https://github.com/hishamhm/htop.git
   git push -u origin master
   

5. Next, I wanted to download the htop website from SourceForge. I usually edited things straight through their shell account, but this got me to an SFTP session in which I could fetch the files:

   sftp loderunner,htop@frs.sf.net

   (By the way, I actually use yafc, which I highly recommend, instead of sftp. Also, as I looked for its URL to post on this paragraph, I just learned that the original yafc 1.1.1 from 2001, which I still use and was hosted in SourceForge and sat there for years without updates, has been taken by a new group of developers who resurrected the project and develop it in Github.)

   The site for htop is really simple so moving it to a new location was a relatively quick process; just needed to grep all references to sf.net and svn, and get my own direct Paypal donation button (to replicate the one I had in SourceForge I used this and this).

6. Getting the archive of releases was a bit trickier. It’s also in frs.sf.net, but you need to know the correct directory. It doesn’t show up when you log in and ls. You have to cd to it:

   yafc ftp://loderunner@frs.sf.net
   # then, in the sftp session:
   cd /home/frs/project/htop
   get -p -r htop
   

   Now I have an archive of all releases, with their (mostly accurate) historical timestamps!

7. The final steps are shutting down the sf.net services, such as the bug tracker and the code repository. This can be done easily through their admin interface. I’ve never had any plans to migrate the bug tracker history; this simplifies things (and I don’t even know if it’s possible). I’m not shutting everything down immediately, though: until I make a proper new release and distro maintainers catch up with the new URLs, I’ll keep the download links active there.

   The original website, however, is now gone and replaced with the following:

   <html>
   <head>
   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://hisham.hm/htop">
   </head>
   </html>
   

   (I did try an .htaccess file, but the sf.net servers kept redirecting to a default page even when I tried to do it via html… thanks to Lynx I realized it was redirecting with a 403 Forbidden error, so I removed the .htaccess file and things worked as expected.)

8. Still TODO: migrate the htop-general mailing list.

One criticism I’ve had of Github in the past was that it did not promote a culture of making proper releases like SourceForge always did, but that has improved in recent years. Github now has a “releases” feature which, while not perfect, does the job in many cases. I’m not sure if I’ll use it, since I prefer to make the tarballs for htop using the make dist feature from GNU Autotools. I hope to cause as little disruption as possible to the distro maintainers and I want to keep my packages looking the same.

The big test for the new setup will be the next release, which I hope to make in time for htop’s tenth anniversary(!), in the coming months. It is quite fitting that htop presents its new home in such a special occasion!