gitlab.gnome.org gmime repo dead?

[mattst88]

I filed an issue in the GNOME gitlab wondering where the new tags were. I see another person has since filed an issue attempting to notify others that the repository is now on GitHub. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gmime/-/issues

What's the story? Can you at least do something to mark the GNOME repository as inactive?

[jstedfast]

I don't (and never did) have access to gitlab.gnome.org. I also don't have an account there.

[mattst88]

Really? I cc'd you in the issue I filed -- or at least I thought I did. Who is https://gitlab.gnome.org/jstedfast ?

[jstedfast]

Looks like my old (pre-gitlab) git.gnome.org account was auto-created there, but it doesn't have maintainer access to gmime

[mattst88]

Ahh, I see.

I guess someone else must have been syncing the repos (but forgetting to push the tags) and publishing tarballs on https://download.gnome.org/sources/gmime/3.2/. Any clue who that might have been?

[jstedfast]

I was pushing tarballs, but I was never syncing this github repo to gitlab. I've been making releases from github for ~5-10 years (before that I did use git.gnome.org, but I stopped using it a few years before they switched to gitlab because all of my other projects were already on github so it didn't make sense to continue).

[jstedfast]

I noticed you also inquired about 3.2.8 - I probably found out I no longer had master.gnome.org access a year ago when I went to make the bump for 3.2.8 and put the tarball release aside until I figured that out (and obviously never got around to it).

I also recently discovered that docs.gnome.org no longer has gmime docs, so I need to find another place to host them (likely github using their github-pages thing).

[mcatanzaro]

I noticed you also inquired about 3.2.8 - I probably found out I no longer had master.gnome.org access a year ago when I went to make the bump for 3.2.8 and put the tarball release aside until I figured that out (and obviously never got around to it).

So this has resulted in at least GNOME and Fedora no longer updating gmime. We finally noticed in February. Your efforts are wasted if distros don't know they need to pull tarballs from a new place. :(

Personally, I think it would have been a lot easier to sort out your GNOME permissions rather than move the repo without any notice, but whatever....

[jstedfast]

I didn't actually move the repo, it's always been here but GNOME mirrored it. I have never used GitLab for development.

[mcatanzaro]

That's extraordinarily weird and not something that could have been set up by accident. A human would have had to have specifically requested that the repo be mirrored from GitHub. I wish we understood how this happened.

Anyway, the GNOME repository is archived now, so that problem is resolved, but the problem that distros are ignoring your updates remains. I would try announcing this someplace that distros will notice (e.g. GNOME Discourse would be a good place). Otherwise, distros will just keep checking https://download.gnome.org/sources/gmime/, seeing that there are no new releases, and not realize there are newer releases here on GitHub.

[jstedfast]

GMime was originally created in 2000 or so when there was no such thing as GitHub on cvs.gnome.org. Later, GNOME migrated everything on cvs.gnome.org to svn.gnome.org when that became the New Best Thing. Then, later, everything on svn.gnome.org was migrated to git.gnome.org at which point I moved development to GitHub because I preferred the issue tracking system but continued publishing via ftp.gnome.org and mirroring my changes back to git.gnome.org every once in a while.

Then GNOME migrated everything from git.gnome.org to GitLab.