ccing vvv who is the author.

Moving repositories is incredibly disruptive right now...is there a really good reason for this other than aesthetics?

That is merely for consistency. Whenever Gerrit is finally able to rename a repository, we will be able to fix that bug. IIRC Christian is more or less working on such a feature.

(In reply to comment #3)

IIRC Christian is more or less
working on such a feature.

Yes, that's correct:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/project:gerrit+branch:wmf+topic:rename-project,n,z

And Chad said that those patches will go into the next gerrit build.

aravikn wrote:

Could someone assign this bug for me?

Christian is already working on this and this is not a good item for newcomers, sorry. :)

(In reply to comment #6)

Christian is already working on this

Sadly ... Christian “used to be” working on this would better reflect
the status quo.

We had a working solution in place and updated it for some time. But
upstream was a bit reluctant to review, as the overall change (~5K LOC
spread into about a dozen changes, adding locking mechanism in inner
parts of gerrit) is huge for the meager benefit of being able to
rename projects. So it never got merged upstream. But as there are no
simpler solutions in sight directly inside gerrit, and since upstream
did not show interest, I stopped investing time.

Even when patching our gerrit to contain those changes, maintaining
them would not be fun.

@Aravind, I'll gladly discuss the current patches with you. If you've
got a love for Java, it might well be possible to do renaming in a
plugin, if you ignore all the possible race conditions. But updating
the patches that handle all the races and add the functionality
directly in gerrit is probably not worth it, as I doubt that upstream
would review it this time. Especially now, when they are more focused
on things like the new ChangeScreen.

Renaming in Gerrit not possible, nor will it be. If the name is a big problem we can start a new repo and push existing history to it.

@demon actually it is possible using this plugin https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/importer/ and https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/delete-project/

and follow this https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/importer/+/refs/heads/master/src/main/resources/Documentation/about.md#Project-Rename

I didn't even realize this was your task that had been opened :P