PSA: Fedorahosted.org will be end of lifed in 2017.

Earlier this week Kevin Fenzi posted to the Fedora announce list that fedorahosted.org would be going away in early 2017. Fedora started offering FedoraHosted in  2007 years before GitHub and such were around. It was based around using Trac from https://trac.edgewall.org/ which fit with the pre-git use of SVN  that many projects used for source code control.  [Trac also had plugins for many other revision control systems as this was a time frame where there were many and people had very strong opinions of which ones needed to be supported.]

In any case, Fedorahosted was very useful for a long time, but in the last 2-3 years has seen a fall off in usage with many projects moving to GitHub. Many of the other projects had become nesting grounds for various spam and some malware. This became very evident during the summer Spam Storm when 27000+ spam pages were created in a couple of tracs. In cleaning those out, I found that around 40 other tracs had various 'tickets' with spam in them that were regularly 'updated' by the spammers for years but the project owners had been '/dev/nulling' any tickets so weren't aware that it was happening.

As outlined Kevin outlines in the email, what will happen is the following:

1. No new fedorahosted projects will be created.
2. Owners of projects will be sent an email letting them know that the sunset is going to occur on February 29, 2017.
3. The owners can then move the project to another source repository system. Examples of these would be:
   • pagure.io
   • gitlab.com
   • github.com
   • launchpad.net
   • others?
4. On February 29, 2017, the files will be put into read-only mode and no further updates will be done. 

As with all such end of life projects, I expect that after number 4 there will be "Hey, no one told me that this was going to happen." emails which will require some sort of 5.. but I am hoping that regular blogs and posts and emails will keep that to a minimum.