[Mpi-forum] MPI Hosting Migration

[Bland, Wesley]

Short Version:

* Everything will be moving away from Indiana University hosting to somewhere else in the near future (before the next MPI Forum meeting, details below).
* If you have wiki pages (or attachments) that you care about that aren’t already migrated from Trac to GitHub, do it very soon (probably by the end of July, maybe a little longer).
* If you have Trac issues where you care about all the formatting being correct, move them to GitHub very soon.

Details:

After many years of graciously hosting our MPI Forum web presence for free, we need to move our data out of Indiana University to other locations. There are a few pieces that this involves:

* Websites (www.mpi-forum.org, meetings.mpi-forum.org<http://meetings.mpi-forum.org>, etc.)
* Trac (old issues, old wiki)
* SVN
* Mailing Lists

As you all recall, we moved our main resources (version control, issues, and wiki) over to GitHub a few years back, but we left archives of our old work, as well as mailing lists and websites at our old location. We’re using this opportunity to move everything else that we can over to GitHub and the rest to other places. Details are still being ironed out, but here’s the plan so far:

* Websites will move to GitHub Pages - The advantage here being the price (free) and the simplicity (Markdown). For those who maintain the pages, it will be a simple transition to new formatting and dynamically generated content. For everyone else, it just look a little different, but the main URLs will remain the same (some of the subpage URLs will change). A mockup of how this will look is now available at https://mpi-forum.github.io/. The general ideas are there, even if the formatting might change a bit between now and then. I’m slowly migrating all the old pages over, but it’ll take some time as this is a very manual process. Don’t worry too much about the fact that the URLs are all github.io<http://github.io>. We’ll fix DNS later when these things are ready for prime time so they are all mpi-forum.org.

* Trac issues will move to GitHub Issues - We didn’t do this last time because we decided that it was a bunch of extra work that we didn’t care about as long as we had an archive of the old work. Now that the archive is going away, we’re doing the extra work to move the rest. I have a mockup of this available at https://github.com/wesbland/mpi-forum-historic. There’s a few different attempts in here with lots of duplicate data and that repository will eventually go away, but https://github.com/wesbland/mpi-forum-historic/issues/46 is a pretty good representation of what to expect. It will be possible to fix the fact that everything is attributed to me if you’re willing to generate an API token and give it to me (instructions here: https://github.com/blog/1509-personal-api-tokens). I’d recommend creating one just for me to use for migration, then throw it away when I’m done. There’s not much that can be done to fix the fact that the dates are wrong in the GitHub metadata (the dates in the comments should be correct). The issue numbers aren’t all correct in my examples (specifically the early ones), but I believe they’ll be correct in the final version.

* Trac wiki will go away - This appears to be a massive amount of extra work that, frankly, I don’t think I’m likely to have time for. Also, we’ve pretty much converted everything we care about in the wiki at this point, and the wiki has less history that we care about preserving than the web sites.

* SVN will go away - This is already all converted to Git so we don’t care.

* Mailing Lists will move somewhere else, but should keep the same URLs and all of the archives - This one is still a little up in the air as we’re nailing down who exactly will be hosting these. However, are a few things that we’re pretty sure of. First, the email addresses should be the same even after the migration. Second, we’ll be able to preserve the archives of all of the old emails in some form. Third, the web links for all the old archives are likely to change so all of our old links will change. Unfortunately, this seems to be a product of the way we were generating links before and will be very tough to fix.

There it is. There’s a lot to digest there and everything isn’t finalized, but it turns out that we have to move pretty quickly on this so I wanted to give people a heads up pretty early on. If something changes, I’ll let you know. If you have feedback, let me know. I’ll try to accommodate requests, but we don’t have a ton of flexibility in what we can and can’t preserve due to limited tools and very limited manpower. If you want something herculean, you might end up implementing it yourself. :)

Thanks,
Wesley
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