Goodbye, gitolite; Hello, gitea

I've been using Gitolite to manage my personal git repositories for over a decade. Combined with gitweb (and later, cgit), it's done its job well and generally stayed out of the way.

Where it falls flat though, is that if you want to use more than one ssh key, you're not going to be able to utilize its auto-created private namespaces without manual intervention or moving stuff out separately. Its simplicity also makes it a lot more challenging to integrate with other things, especially when the repositories are private.

The last straw though, was discovering that my server bandwidth was being swamped by things constantly hitting the anonymous git service, with no real ability to monitor/track/restrict it. If I was going to disable that and break a bunch of things, I figured it was the time to just go all the way and gain some new functionality for my efforts.

So.. I finally bit the bullet, and after a couple of days of insanity, have switched everything over to Gitea -- it's nicely self-contained and straightforward to administer, yet has all the modern bells and whistles expected of a software forge. It will also make it a lot easier to work with my occasional moonlighting clients without having to use the likes of GitHub.

This migration was more annoying than I expected, but that was mostly of my own doing as I decided to rewrite the history of two of my public projects to enable them to take advantage of git-lfs. This wasn't the right call, and I intend to go back and partially rectify it.

git-lfs aside, I think the overall effort is well worth it -- For example, I'll eventually be able to retire the standalone wiki and bug trackers I'm also hosting, which will help shrink ShaftNet's special snowflake server/service footprint and thus reduce my administrative burden. It sure beats letting everything rot, or just just dropping altogether.

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