WEBVTT

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Ok, welcome back to the second session
of the day.

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It's going to be Alexander Wirt talking
about salsa.debian.org.

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[Applause]

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Thank you, good morning.

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I usually don't give talks in english,
so please be nice to me.

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However, I'm here.

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I want to talk today about our journey
for Alioth

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which is still running, but not for long
anymore,

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to our new service, salsa.

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I want to get a little bit into the history
of old things

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and what we have already achieved,
what we still need to achieve

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and what are our plans for the future.

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Let's start with the basic things,
who am I.

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I am the guy who rejects the mails
on lists.debian.org,

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I am a listmaster.

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I am the guy that rejects your backports.

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I am the backports ftp master.

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And I am the guy that will destroy
alioth.debian.org.

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For the last ten years

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[Applause]

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I was an admin by accident of
alioth.debian.org.

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This is another story I will tell you
in a few minutes.

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Beside from that, I work as an OpenSource
consultant at credativ,

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which is a small company in Germany
which is specialized in OpenSource,

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we only do OpenSource consulting
in Germany.

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We do what today is called DevOps,
we do every kind of consulting.

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If you do something with OpenSource,
we are probably the ones you can talk with.

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I am a father of two wonderful girls,

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they're not here unfortunately,

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but otherwise I wouldn't be able
to work.

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And in my little bit spare time, I do
role playing games and Tabletop games.

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In theory there should be a picture now.

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There's a picture missing,
I don't know why,

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which should tell "We need you".

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A little bit of advertisement, if you
want to do OpenSource work in Germany,

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paid,

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and you need a job, please talk to me.

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We are always looking for good people,
especially in C development,

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kernel development, but also of course
consulting.

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So please talk to me.

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Some steps in history.

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Some years ago, ???
2008, 2009,

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I told the alioth channel

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"Hey, if you need help, I can help with
system administration,

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not the GForge stuff which is running
above,

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but if you need help, tell me."

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[Audience] Big mistake

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Yeah.

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One or two years went by,
and step by step

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all alioth admins left.

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We were alone in the channel.

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And around that time, I detected

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"Hey, I have sudo permissions
and I'm admin"

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Somebody made me an admin.

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So, I had to decide that I will be
the person that is the future alioth admin

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and I stepped in.

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So it was the beginning of our alioth
journey.

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Then, in DebConf15, we had a long
'Birds of a Feather'

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where we talked about several security
problems in collab-maint,

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some of you are maybe not aware of it,

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but since we use git at filesystem level
on alioth,

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we are introducing a number of interesting
security problems

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like if someone writes a hook, that hook
gets executed every time someone pushes.

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So you have basically shell access.

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And of course you execute it as
your own uid.

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So, if some DM (Debian Maintainer) or even
not DM, nearly the whole world

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has write access to collab-maint,

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drops some hooks in,

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it can make you execute code on Alioth
at your uid, which is a problem.

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We did some things to solve that problem,
but the main problem remained.

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So, along that time, we decided that we
would need a successor for git.debian.org.

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At that point, we are talking about gitolite

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which we evaluated at that time.

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However, as ???

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Two years went into the land and
nothing real happened,

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we just played with it.

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Then, May 2017, a thread comes up,
"Moving away from fusionforge".

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What nobody was really aware of, is that
alioth is on a Wheezy machine

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and Wheezy is ??? out of security
support end of the month.

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So time was running up.

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The thread was long as usual on
debian-devel and

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we decided to do a few steps, like
evaluating things

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and in June 2017, I did a survey about
our new alioth services.

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It was clear at that point that I wouldn't
be able to maintain all the things

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alioth had in the future

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so we decided to just bring over
the important things.

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What is important? For everyone,
everything else is important

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so I decided to do a survey which was
pretty successful

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with a few hundreds submissions.

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Then, in…

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Then we evaluated… "we" as probably "me",

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evaluated a few solutions, named pagure,
which is the git solution Fedora is using,

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which is a Python thing based on gitolite,

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gitlab, which is the biggest Github
competitor

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gogs/gitea, which is some golang-based
small git service.

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pagure turned out to be not stable enough
for our needs

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and we would have to do to much coding
inside pagure to use it in our infrastructure

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because pagure is very strongly ???
with the Fedora infrastructure,

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specially its user authentication and
user management stuff.

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Gitlab had an other problem called
"opencore" and

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"contributor license agreement"
which means

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I and others were not very happy with
contributing code to Gitlab

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which is something that will always
happen if you maintain such a service.

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And gogs and gitea is nice but it's small

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It will not be able to manage 10,000s
of repositories.

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Next step happened in August 2017 when
we had a sprint here in Hamburg

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at the hackerlab CCC on the other side
of the building,

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where we talked about it.

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After long discussions, we decided to go
with Gitlab

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because Gitlab, at that point, was
the best solution that was already ready.

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We didn't have to adapt too much, we don't
need to patch it

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which turned out it isn't true, but it's
an other problem

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It had features like continuous integration
ready,

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it had features like code review ready,
wiki pretty good working

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and ??? very scalable
in all directions

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Every component is scalable which is
good for us.

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This is a TODO point, I wanted to add
an image about the restaurant

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where we decided on the name "salsa".

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Somebody of you may ask yourself where
the name is coming from.

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There's a small mexican restaurant
a few hundred meters from here

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where you can get great burritos and
they have a painting at the back

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with the term "salsa" written

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and we were deciding on a name which
just not describes the type of service on it

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so we wanted…

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Yes, it's also a sauce. So salsa had sauce.

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I wanted to call it Klaus, but we decided
against it so somebody came up

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in the restaurant with the name "salsa"
and so it's called salsa.

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In the meanwhile, we talked a lot with
the Gitlab people

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which were very kind and helped us
with our problems.

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We also talked with them about the CLA
problem and after some discussions,

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the lawyer of SPI was also involved,

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we made them to remove the CLA
and replace it with something better.

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Contributing patches to Gitlab is now
much easier and better

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which is something we are very proud of

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[Applause]