Escape from NeSCForge

NeSCForge - home to the NGS's collection of software, documentation and training material - is officially doomed.

On 20 December 2010, the service will be turned off: there simply isn't the money available to keep it running.

NeSCForge has long provided our version control repository. The code we developed to simply the deployment of grid software lives there, as does the Myproxy enabled GSISSH and the accounting clients.

We needed to find a new home for our software sharpish - and we didn't want to break anything when we did. In particular, we wanted to retain the code and the history of changes in our CVS repository.

Which made the decision about where to go, very easy.

The only public software hosting service which provides CVS support is SourceForge. On 7 November, the UKNGI project joined SourceForge.

Why UKNGI? Partially because we are becoming part of the UK National Grid Initiative, but mostly because the NGS name was already taken.

The next stage is moving all our data and - with perfect timing - the Software Sustainability Institute has come to galloping to the rescue. They have recently extended their collection of guides for developers to include:

• choosing a repository,
• migrating to a new repository,
• retrieving files from NeSCForge,
• and creating and managing projects on SourceForge
  

That covers what we need to do nicely.

Earlier today - following those last two guides - we copied the CVS repository from NeSCForge to its new home on SourceForge - with all branches and tags and other version control stuff intact. We have also added Subversion and Git based repositories which we expect to use for future development.

The software releases and other files will be moving soon and we can allow NeSCForge to retire gracefully.