2018-08-29  Platform migration

The migration of the ageing Orekit development platform on a new server became urgent. We decided to take advantage of the opportunity to modernize our tools.

A new forge

The first migrated component was the forge. From now on, Redmine is replaced by a self-hosted Gitlab instance:

https://gitlab.orekit.org/

A side effect is that a lot of url were modified, beginning with that of Git repositories. Further details available here.

Bye bye mailing lists, welcome forum!

The mailing lists provided a great service to Orekit community, but they are not flawless and the tools used to manage them and access to their archives are becoming outmoded. In the meantime, a new generation of forum managers emerged. More ergonomic than mailing lists, they have a nice and up-to-date web interface and they provide a better user experience.

So, we decided to replace our mailing lists by a forum powered by Discourse:

https://forum.orekit.org/

The mailing lists will be closed in the near future.

Next steps

The migration is still underway. A new instance of our continuous integration tool (Jenkins) was deployed, but the jobs are not yet migrated on it because we are reshaping our approach of continuous integration:

https://ci.orekit.org/

After that, a lot of invisible but essential tools, like the mail server or the backup tool, will be migrated.

News summary