Move Off Trac

The goal of this page is to cover the phases of a project aiming at moving some critical features from Trac to an other solution (or combination of).

Scope

Goals and Requirements

1. MUST replace Trac as currently used for Ticket and Wiki by some alternative(s):
   • MUST look better: current UI looks old which makes the Tahoe-LAFS project looking dead
   • MUST be better maintained: Trac is dying? max 2 contributors per month - ​https://openhub.net/p/trac
   • MUST be easier to maintain: Trac is difficult to update (current = v1.0.13/2016-09-11, latest = v1.6.0/2023-09-23)?
   • MUST allow Self-Registration (Trac requires manual registration via email)
   • COULD support OAuth2 with GitHub??
   • MUST be (F)OSS
   • MUST be self-hostable
     • note "able": MUST be a story for getting to a self-hosted instance if we want
     • ..but doesn't have to be self-hosted right away
2. MUST replace the current landing page (StartPage? from the Wiki):
   • preferably with a static blog/page generator updated from a Git repo (e.g.: (Go)Jekyll, HuGo?)
   • possibly with a LAMP stack as discussed: ​https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/3892
3. COULD be used to replace:
   • GitHub? code hosting and review (pull request), keeping only a mirrored clone
   • GitHub? Actions (to avoid leaving secrets in environment variables)
   • Circle CI (to avoid giving them too many permissions)

Inclusions

• Trac users of the Tahoe-LAFS project
• Trac issues of the Tahoe-LAFS project
• Trac wiki pages of the Tahoe-LAFS project
• Trac HTML home page of the Tahoe-LAFS project
• Hall of Fame HTML page of the Tahoe-LAFS project
• The related DNS records (mostly: tahoe-lafs.org)

Exclusions

• Binary repository for Tahoe-LAFS releases (​https://tahoe-lafs.org/downloads)
• Other Trac projects (see DevInfra)
• Buildbot master instances for some other Trac projects
• DARCS SCM for some of the other Trac projects
• Any other services provided by the current server and not yet documented in DevInfra

Deliverables

1. A VPS (hosted by Hetzner) providing 4 features powered by NixOS and Gitea:
   • a tracking system provisioned with the issues migrated from Trac (same numbers)
   • a Wiki system provisioned with the relevant pages migrated from Trac (same names)
   • a static website replacing the landing page from Trac with the code required for CI and CD
   • a blog post for the Hall of Fame page (if sensible - fallback = static page)
   • a repository defining the VPS it-self and its configuration as code (including the secrets)
2. A detailed migration plan to handle the transition (DNS changes and/or redirections)
   • w/ or w/o terraform code covering the DNS (if Gandi supports it? fallback on manual steps)
3. An high-level migration plan for the features hosted on the VPS described to be later hosted on Codeberg SaaS (assuming it is possible)