(In reply to christian from comment #1)
> > If it was a conscious choice to do this I'm curious why.
> 
> We want all gerrit repos replicated on github.
> 
> We could setup replication for each repository in our gerrit
> separately. That would allow full control of repository names at
> github. But it is tedious, time-consuming, and has other warts too.
> 

> So in order to escape such a messy, verbose replication setup, gerrit
> replicates each and every projects to github under the name that gets
> used on gerrit [1]. For this replication, we do not prune leading
> paths, as that would map different names on gerrit to the same names
> on github [2].

I wasn't suggesting that we do it manually. All repos should be replicated. I'm also well-aware of naming conflicts if we were to prune leading paths. Nobody was suggesting that.

> However, some people felt strongly that they needed a better
> repository name on github, or had a following on github that they
> would not want to loose. So they had an additional, separate
> replication target set up. And hence, those repositories get replicated
> twice to github. Once for the canonical name. And a second time for
> the custom name of their liking.

Exactly. And there's no reason to have to replications. It should be easy to remove the additional one. For projects using github more publicly, they tend to have a better name there to hide internal implementation details of Gerrit or Wikimedia (e.g. VisualEditor, MediaWiki and OOjs have stupidly named repos in gerrit of VisualEditor/VisualEditor and oojs/core and mediawiki/core, this is due to conventions and limitations in our use of Gerrit).

> > Also note that GitHub supports renaming of repositories and
> > automatically keeps redirects[...]
> 
> Thanks! That wasn't available when we added custom replication.
> We could use that to solve most issues.
> 
> > As an example I've created a redirect from
> > https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki to
> > https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-core. Eventually this should be
> > done the other way around [...]
> 
> Not too sure about this one.
> Doing it “the other way around” would make it even more confusing for
> people, because the “canonical” github name would differ from the
> gerrit name too much to be able to map it clearly.
> 

I'm not sure you understood that I meant.

Right now we replicate all repos from <gerrit-id> to github:<gerrit-id-escaped> and have additional replications for those that needed better names.

I'm saying: Omit the ones with custom names from the wildcard replication so that there's only one.

For existing repos already replicated twice, we'll have to manually remove the (now stale) repository from the admin panel at github. While at it, we can turn those into redirects to the custom name to make sure any urls stay working.