Setup an official repository mirror, as a backup for GitHub outages

[oleonardolima]

Describe the enhancement

As the last GitHub incident happened during a PR Review Club yesterday (14/08), it raised me a question:

• Should we have an official .git repository mirror as backup, at least for the repository, and if possible with the issues too?
• Can/Should we host it under the bitcoindevkit.org?

Use case

It adds another layer of backup and prevents getting locked out of issues/code during GitHub outages.

Additional context

It didn't affect the PR Review only because I could use the locally fetched repository but still is something we minimize relying totally on GitHub.

[storopoli]

Please do not use Gitea. Instead use Forgejo

Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project.

[notmandatory]

From @darosior on discord:"fyi Fabian Jahr worked on a setting up a Gitlab mirror for the Bitcoin Core project as a PoC. Anyone working on this might want to reach out to him."

[notmandatory]

Looks like we can get a free open source hosted Gitlab account: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/

Should I try applying for that? As far as I can tell Gitlab has the best feature parity with Github. Also we should be able to import our existing Github meta-data into Gitlab.

[oleonardolima]

I know a few other projects that rely on GitLab (e.g. Tor, Iterm2), it seems pretty good, and I agree it has good feature parity, for example, Iterm uses GitLab to track issues (as they say it's better than GitHub).

I was taking a look at Forgejo (Jose's suggestion) and found some resources that might be useful: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#scripts, but I'm not sure if it works properly covering all metadata we'd like to and with GitLab, requires further research.

[notmandatory]

When I was at Disney all the studio software groups used GitLab. The main downside I can see is that it's non-trivial to setup and manage and really requires a dedicated team. But if GitLab will give us a free hosted open source account then we don't have to host it ourselves. But we'd still have the option to export the data and self host it some day if we really needed to.

[luisschwab]

If you guys decide to go the self-hosted route, I could set it up.