Salsa webhooks and integrated services

Since many years now, Debian is facing an issue with one of its most important services: alioth.debian.org (Debian's forge). It is used by most the teams and hosts thousands of repositories (of all sorts) and mailing-lists. The service was stable (and still is), but not maintained. So it became increasingly important to find its replacement.

Recently, a team for volunteers organized a sprint to work on the replacement of Alioth. I was very skeptical about the status of this new project until... tada! An announcement was sent out about the beta release of this new service: salsa.debian.org (a GitLab CE instance). Of course, Salsa hosts only Git repositories and doesn't deal with other {D,}VCSes used on Alioth (like Darcs, Svn, CVS, Bazaar and Mercurial) but it is a huge step forward!

I must say that I absolutely love this new service which brings fresh air to Debian developers. We all owe a debt of gratitude to all those who made this possible. Thank you very much for working on this!

Alas, no automatic migration was done between the two services (for good reasons). The migration is left to the maintainers. It might be an easy task for some who maintain a few packages, but it is a depressing task for bigger teams.

To make this easy, Christoph Berg wrote a batch import script to import a Git repository in a single step. Unfortunately, GitLab is what it is... and it is not possible to set team-wide parameters to use in each repository. Salsa's documentation describes how to configure that for each repository (project, in GitLab's jargon) but this click-monkey-work is really not for many of us. Fortunately, GitLab has a nice API and all this is scriptable. So I wrote some scripts to:

• Import a Git repo (mainly Christoph's script with an enhancement)
• Set up IRC notifications
• Configure email pushes on commits
• Enable webhooks to automatically tag 'pending' or 'close' Debian BTS bugs depending on mentions in commits messages.

I published those scripts here: salsa-scripts. They are not meant to be beautiful, but only to make your life a little less miserable. I hope you find them useful. Personally, this first step was a prerequisite for the migration of my personal and team repositories over to Salsa. If more people want to contribute to those scripts, I can move the repository into the Debian group.