To start using GitLab for your prior contributions to SIESTA, the first and essential step is to fork the official repository directly on Gitlab. This will greatly help the maintenance of SIESTA on the long run and the communication between its diverse contributors.
Here is how to proceed (a more detailed list follows just after):
When you go to the official SIESTA repository, you should see the following in the upper part of the page:
Click on the fork button located at the top-right part of the screen, as highlighted in the above image with a red ellipse.
When forking a repository, you have to specify the namespace to use for the copy of the source repository, as shown in the image below. The namespace is like a domain controlled by a specific user or team. Is is instrumental in defining who can do what on the new repository.
Since Git and Gitlab provide a lot of flexibility to coordinate distributed development efforts, we highly recommend you to create the forked repository under your personal namespace. You still can create team-wise secondary repositories and/or transfer yours to a team in the future should you need it. To use your personal namespace, click on you user avatar, as highlighted above.
Once you have clicked on your avatar, Gitlab will create a copy of the official repository in the background and mark the official SIESTA repository as the parent of yours.
Just wait that the operation gets done. It should take a minute at most.
You should now see your personal SIESTA repository, as shown below.
Feel free to explore it and check that it contains the baseline information you need to continue your developments.
Go to the issues of the official SIESTA repository: https://gitlab.com/siesta-project/siesta/issues.
Click on the “New issue” button at the top-right corner of the screen, as highlighted above. When the issue appears, select the “SIESTA migration” template before filling-in the issue title and description, as shown below. Follow the instructions provided by the template and add any request that may have arisen from the previous step. When done, submit the issue by clicking on the green “Submit” button.
Go to your personal SIESTA repository. To look for it, you can click on the “Projects” menu at the top-left of the page and type “siesta” if you don’t see it in the list. Then, once in your repository, click on the “Settings” menu item on the left hand-side of the page (symbol: cog), as shown below. Then click on “Members”.
If you have submitted your issue before November 30th, 2019, click on the “Add members” form field and type “pouillon”. Then confirm by clicking on the green button “Add to project” and make sure that user pouillon has a “Maintainer” role on your project. If you have submitted your issue after that date, please contact the maintainers of SIESTA to know who will be able to help you with your migration.
If you haven’t disabled email notifications on your account, you will receive a message at the email address you have registered in Gitlab. This should only take a few days, depending on our availability. In the meantime, we recommend you not to do anything in your repository.
At this stage, you should have recovered your branches from Launchpad.
Repeat the actions of step 6 but the last one. Remove the SIESTA maintainer as member of your repository by clicking on the trash bin at the right-hand side of their name, if they have not done it themselves.
You’re now done. Happy coding!