SoundSoftware Code Site

Due to urgent electrical work, the SoundSoftware site and services will be unavailable for the entire weekend of the 10-11th February 2018. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The server hardware issues that were causing very poor performance during the past few weeks have finally been properly resolved through a server move. We expect performance to be up to speed again now, and no data should have been lost. Please let us know if you run into any ongoing problems.

Following a recent network and power outage, this site is currently running far more slowly and less reliably than it has been and should be. We're sorry for this, and are working on a thorough fix. We thank you for your patience.

Code repositories and file downloads from this site are available again following an earlier network switch failure. We apologise for any inconvenience arising from this outage.

SoundSoftware services were unavailable overnight following a failure of the cooling system at the hosting site. Services were shut down cleanly in order to avoid overheating, but there was unfortunately no opportunity to notify users beforehand. Service has been restored this morning. Our apologies for this outage.

The SoundSoftware code site uses Mercurial as its native version control system. To make it easier to get on with people and systems that use Git instead, we've just added a simple read-only Git interface for the public projects on the site.

What's new¶

Each public project on this site now has a Git clone URL, that is the same as its Mercurial clone URL but with "hg" replaced by "git".

For example, given a public project named "myproject", the Mercurial repository has always been (and continues to be) available via a command like

$ hg clone https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/hg/myproject

And now the same repository, with all its history and branches, is now available via Git using

$ git clone https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/git/myproject

This is a read-only mirror: you can't push to this URL, it is simply silently updated to reflect the contents of the project's Mercurial repository. That update happens periodically so there may be a delay of up to an hour before each commit pushed to the Mercurial repo becomes available via Git. (We may reduce or eliminate this delay later on.)

The feature is designed as a repository mirror, not an endpoint for active everyday use. There is currently no access control for this service, so only public projects are made available in this way.

An example with a real project:

$ git clone https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/git/cepstral-pitchtracker

Use cases¶

1. You have a published software project (not one undergoing rapid development) and you want to publicise it to users who prefer Git (and who are not project members who would need commit access).

2. You have started a project on the SoundSoftware site and you decide later that you want to move it to, or mirror it on, Github. You can do that like this:

# create a bare git repository (not a working copy) containing
# the entire history and all branches:
$ git clone --mirror https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/git/myproject
$ cd myproject.git
# ... and mirror it to a Github repo:
$ git push --mirror --repo=git@github.com:myself/myproject.git

(Note that you can already do this the other way around, using the SoundSoftware site to mirror a project whose primary hosting is at Github. See the "Track an external repository" option in your project's Settings -> Repositories for details.)

Other limitations¶

• The Git clone URL is not yet displayed in the project's repository page. We're still considering how this information should be shown, given that the Git repo is a mirror with some limitations rather than a "first-class" copy.

• The Git clone URL can only be used with a Git client; you can't browse to it in a web browser.

• Mercurial subrepositories are not converted, so if you clone a repo for a project that uses subrepos, you will get only the containing repository without any of the subrepos in it.

Due to essential router maintenance work, this service will be unavailable for up to two hours on the morning of Thursday 27th August 2015.

Services are now fully available again, following disruption caused by a power failure at the hosting site.

At around 15:00 BST yesterday the three-phase power supply to the hosting site failed, causing a loss of cooling and network connectivity. The servers were cleanly shut down before the supply company was able to attend at around 20:00 and services finally restarted this morning. The timing was unfortunate in terms of admin availability, so it took us longer to restore access than it should have, and we did not anticipate the length of the resulting outage. Our apologies for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

As a consequence of construction work at the hosting site, the SoundSoftware code site and its associated resources may be unavailable for some hours during the day on Saturday 28th February. Our apologies for the short notice.

A networking configuration change made earlier in this week appears to have successfully resolved the problem pushing large changesets and attaching files to projects on this repository. If you have any further problems in this area, please let us know!