repo.zoidberg.org / site guide / About the Site

repo.zoidberg.org is a public Git hosting site. You can create a project here and then publish your development by pushing to it, or even enable push access for multiple developers. Alternately, you can just set up a mirror of any project published elsewhere and we will provide pull and gitweb access for the project.

In the push mode, every developer that wants push access will need to create an account and use SSH for pushing changes; using the project administration password, you will be able to add/remove permission for developers to push. Also, optional anonymous push access to a dedicated mob branch is supported.

In the mirror mode, we will check the remote repository at the URL you give us every hour and if we spot any changes, we will grab them, mirror them and show them in our gitweb interface. It's a matter of few clicks to set up a mirror - don't be shy and feel free to create mirror for any git project without a decent gitweb interface or with badly hosted repository; you don't need to be the project maintainer to setup a mirror.

Terms and Conditions

There are only two conditions:

• Your project must be free software and distributing it must not violate laws of Germany. (The registration process is completely automatic but we will remove your project if we find out during manual inspection or on request by someone relevant.)
• The repository size should not exceed 100M after repacking (let us know if you need an exception). If you need more, you are running quite a big project and should be able to arrange own hosting; but we can and likely will grant exceptions. Note that e.g. a CVS-imported glibc repository with ~15 years worth of history is just 100M.

This site provides NO WARRANTY of any legal kind about whatever you store here. Someone can crack your account or the site, alter the data, make mayhem and whatever else; we cannot be held responsible for any manage that may be caused to you in any way in connection with this site.

Backup policy

Your repository is NOT backed up! Why? Because you have backups yourself, and all your users do, too! The distributed nature of Git means that all the developers and all the users who ever cloned the repository have the full history of it, and shall any disaster happen to repo.zoidberg.org, all can be easily restored by a single simple push. That said, we may set up backups in the future if the service becomes popular enough.

Actually, the metadata and project information is not backed up either currently. We'll fix that soon.

Operation

repo.zoidberg.org runs on a far from stellar machine (AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1G RAM, 40G disk) that also hosts a lot of other, sometimes CPU- and I/O-intensive stuff. If you want to sponsor a hosting and a better machine, you'd better do that for repo.or.cz, the big brother of this site.

Virtually all the infrastructure is available in a git repository repo.git and is licenced under GPLv2. repo.zoidberg.org development was done by Petr Baudis over at repo.or.cz, which this site is a clone of.

Competition

Other big Git(web) hostings:

• repo.or.cz for any open-source projects
• GitHub for small open-source projects and paid hosting for anything else.
• kernel.org/git for kernel-related and Git-related projects
• www.jur-linux.org/git/ for random mirrors of Fedora-related projects

(But, apart from repo.or.cz, they don't have the open nature of repo.zoidberg.org.)