plan a public git.ocaml.org service

[avsm]

See ocaml/ocaml.org#1169 for the overall tracking issue.

status: incubate

We currently have a private machine that mirrors a few hundred git repositories from GitHub to a filesystem. This isn't exposed to the outside world, but there have been a few requests to do so. The first reason is in the event of an outage in GitHub to increase availability of our source code repositories. The second is to avoid long term lockin to GitHub -- which involves not just the Git sources, but also the project metadata (issues, PRs, projects) around it.

This project is probably best split into two phases:

• phase 1 would be simply mirroring the Git repos and re-exposing them as a git.ocaml.org clonable endpoint.
• phase 2 would investigate how to mirror the GitHub metadata. There is some precedent for this in the opam repository ci (via the datakit-github-bridge which bidirectionally mirrors GitHub to 9P filesystems), but it is frightfully complex and not something we felt we could maintain in the long term.

There have been several requests in the past for a non-GitHub workflow for contributions to OCaml projects. Unfortunately right now we do have a hard dependency on GitHub (mainly for PRs), but I'm hopeful that this project making progress will give us alternatives in the future.

Consider gitlab, rhodecode, gitea, gogs, if they are useful to this project. Can also directly use a mission driven outside host like codeberg (gitea), notabug.org (gogs), or framagit (gitlab)