650518 - Remove old projects from hg.mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Developer Services :: Mercurial: hg.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Paul Biggar]

When looking at repositories at http://hg.mozilla.org, many old projects look back, confusing new contributors.


Is there a way we can delete, archive, or otherwise make it clear that those projects are old and unmaintained?

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

To which repositories would you be referring to? The only ones that haven't been touched in a while on the root page are some old Tamarin/ActionMonkey-related ones. Everything else seems to be updated at least in the last several months.

We can't delete repositories, but maybe we can move some to an archive directory or some such. However, I don't generally see the usefulness of that.

Comment 2

[Paul Biggar]

Obviously, this is only a small win. But there are lots of broken windows across the Mozilla project which make it difficult for newcomers to know what is what. In this particular case, it makes me think "am I even in the right place?"

I believe that the new release process is going to do some renaming of the other things (putting things into subdirectories of project/ or similar), which will finish the tidying. But that's not this bug.


An archive directory seems the right way to deal with this. I'm talking about the things on the list which were last updated before 2010. I believe none of those will ever come back.

Comment 3

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

If you actually want to shuffle repos around, this needs to be in Server Ops.

Comment 4

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

joduinn, legneato:

what is the releng/dev impact of moving repos that have not been changed since <= 2010 into an archive directory?

If you both can sign off on this, I'll ask jabba to take on this task (working with noah)

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I think that depends entirely on which repositories we're talking about, specifically. I don't think we can use an indiscriminate "hasn't been touched in X days" metric.

Someone needs to generate a proposed list of repositories to remove, so that we can discuss specifics.

Comment 6

[LegNeato]

(In reply to comment #4)
> joduinn, legneato:
> 
> what is the releng/dev impact of moving repos that have not been changed
> since <= 2010 into an archive directory?
> 
> If you both can sign off on this, I'll ask jabba to take on this task
> (working with noah)

I'd like to see a list, but at first glance I'd be fine with it...though I don't really see much benefit.

I also think we should message this widely if we choose to do it so people have a chance to speak up. We should also do some web searches and see what links to the various repos.

Comment 7

[LegNeato]

An alternative (and possibly better approach) would be to hide them on the main hgweb listing.

Comment 8

[Paul Biggar]

These can definitely go:

     actionmonkey	unknown	at Fri Jul 11 11:26:04 2008
     actionmonkey-tamarin	unknown	at Fri Jul 11 10:45:57 2008
     try.b0rked	Junk. Don't use this. It will be deleted soon.	at Thu May 12 17:19:17 2011

I think these can go:

     tamarin-tracing	Development repository for trace-optimizing Tamarin interpreter	at Thu Oct 02 11:17:35 2008
     mobile-browser	Firefox on mobile devices.	at Thu Mar 31 17:27:23 2011


These probably have a better home than the frontpage, I think (no offense intended - I just find it unlikely that someone is coming to hg.mozilla.org to find these):

     dom-inspector	Current development on the DOM Inspector add-on	at Mon Jul 11 12:32:22 2011
     graphs	unknown	at Thu Jul 14 18:57:49 2011
     penelope	unknown	at Tue Oct 05 12:47:48
     pyxpcom	The Python to XPCOM bridge. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/PyXPCOM for more details	at Sat Jul 02 19:46:38 2011
     schema-validation	Current development on schema validation extension	at Fri Nov 19 04:01:48 2010
     tamarin-central	Release repository of the Tamarin runtime engine	at Wed Mar 10 15:59:03 2010
     tamarin-redux	Development repository of the Tamarin runtime engine	at Mon Jul 18 13:29:19 2011
     venkman	Current development on Venkman, Mozilla's JavaScript Debugger, add-on	at Wed Jul 06 01:16:24 2011
     xforms	Current development on the xforms add-on 	at Tue Dec 07 15:09:42 2010


Just hiding is fine by me. Inbound links won't affect us if we redirect to their new homes.

Comment 9

[Justin Dow [:jabba]]

Sounds like some discussion needs to happen here still. I'm putting this back in HG: Customizations for now. When all discussion has taken place and some specific actions have been decided on, feel free to assign back to Server Ops.

Comment 10

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

While we should definitely prune repositories or have some other way to mark them as obsolete, this bug has been dormant forever and I see little value in keeping it open.