My personal projects and code have lived a long life. I have been using RCS locally, CVS and SVN. My first public repositories was in my local Perl user group Copenhagen Perl Mongers, where we shared a central repository. It started out as CVS, but was migrated to SVN about the same time as I started uploading distributions to CPAN.
In parallel I also set up a few projects at SourceForge and later at Google Code, both using SVN (SourceForge started out as CVS for me, but migration had taken place at some point). Actually the most important project of mine there was Workflow, which was migrated from a closed SVN repository from the original author Chris Winters to SourceForge.
Anyway – for a long time I worked as a freelancer, dreaming of doing my own software instead of others. So I decided to go for a hosted solution with Versionshelf, I later changed to Atlassian, which at that time had nice product consisting of Jira, Confluence, Fisheye and Subversion (it was actually Fisheye, which let me to this, metadata on code has always intrigued me). All my new projects public and non-public got hosted here, but I still had a legacy stuck at the Copenhagen Perl Mongers Subversion server.
I got Google Code migrated to the Atlassian platform, but stayed with SourceForge because of the project organisation. The Cph.pm repos was a dead end, due to the structure, several attempts at getting the projects extracted properly was unsuccessful.
Then came Github a long and a completely new trend in VCS systems. Not always being a first mover I decided to stay put. I still wanted to migrate my old codebase, but could not find the time to sit down and do it.
Michael Schwern created Gitpan, which seemed like a nice solution, but it was based solely on the releases and a lot of history would be lost (to me a serious loss of meta data). There was even some nice blog posts on how to get the most out of Gitpan.
Workflow got migrated from SourceForge to Github, even though SourceForge hosted Git. I had experienced some issues with the administrative interfaces, which rendered the platform useless in a confusing redirect hell (this has been addressed now).
Atlassian then announced the end of life for their Subversion hosting and migration to Git (Bitbucket/Github) was possible. This was the push I needed and all of my code hosted with Atlassian got migrated, well almost all of it I still have some old customer projects still in a Subversion dump. But all of my open source projects got migrated to Github.
All my new projects now start up on Github. But still I looked at my legacy of distributions on CPAN, which I did not have active repositories for and it haunted me.
The in the summer of 2014 (this summer), I fell over Tony Bowden’s Business::Tax::VAT. I have used Business::Tax::VAT::Validation for some projects and never discovered this module, so I checked it out and it seemed that it had not had any releases in a long time and 3 our of 4 RTs was low-hanging fruit, but no Git repo.
So I mailed Tony Bowden and got COMAINT on PAUSE, we wrote back and forth about Github and we investigated the Gitpan version. Luckily the latest version on CPAN was aligned with Gitpan, so I could pick up from there. Fork, Fix and Free. Got the 3 tickets closed and shipped a release, I had to do additional release when it got picked up by the CPAN testers, but that was nothing when it was hosted on Github.
This struck me as a marvellous situation, so I went back to Gitpan and compared it’s versions of my legacy distributions which was not on Github and I was able to create forks of all of them. Yes, this would mean loss of history, but again I would much rather be able to code and maintain, than not being able to do anything.
So now all of my open source Perl projects are on Gitpan and I am a very happy camper. Maintenance releases will start to go out for most of the legacy and some will be deleted (completely) from CPAN, since they are of no value, but they will still be on BackPAN, Gitpan and for me on Github.
My legacy is under control and I am no longer stranded in migration.
jonasbn, Copenhagen