In the conversion to git, we plan on discontinuing the projects and user branches. This should have been communicated sooner, but has not been.
The historical projects and user branches will be converted to git and be read only. You'll not be able to push commits to them once we've made the conversion. These are lightly used today, and it is simpler to discontinue this service than to deal with the logistical issues having them in the tree would cause.
To not pollute the branch namespace, they will be not
fetched by default. One needs to add the following to the remote
for freebsd
fetch = +refs/projects/*:refs/projects/*
fetch = +refs/user/*:refs/user/*
to fetch them. You can also choose to fetch a smaller portion of that namespace if you like.
Since they are in a separate namespace, you'll need to add ref/
to the front of them name. To re-create your old user branch:
% git checkout -b masq ref/user/imp/masq
This will create a local branch named masq. But you'll be unable to push these branches to FreeBSD's src repo.
We've done this to simplify the FreeBSD repository. Going forward, it will just be for project branches. Collaborative works will be done in forked repositories. There are several sites that can host this. At the present we have no plans to offer hosting services for this purpose. However, if there's demand those plans can change in the future. Most of this work has already moved to github forks and other platforms hosted elsewhere, however.
In the mean time, github.com, gitlab.com and sourceforge offer free hosting services anything should you need this. launchpad.net also has some interesting hosting options as well.