3:19 p.m.
Hello everyone,
At the moment the DebOps organization on GitHub[1] has 150 repositories, most
of which are old Ansible roles in separate repo each. This seems to cause
confusion among new and experienced DebOps users regarding where exactly the
project is developed and how to use it effectively. Even the archived
repositories can cause such issues.
After talking about it for a bit on the #debops IRC channel, we came to the
conclusion that the old role repositories, no longer available via Ansible
Galaxy, should be removed from GitHub as well to focus attention on the
DebOps monorepo.
That unfortunately means loss of easy access to the git history, issues and
pull requests. The git history of each role is included in the DebOps
monorepo, although in a rather hard to access state due to the fact that the
files of each role had to be moved to keep the commit signatures intact.
However, the migration to the monorepo happened almost 2 years ago, and
separate role repositories haven't had much changes since, so I think removing
them will be beneficial.
During the weekend, I'll move any open issues from the separate repositories
to the monorepo so that they can be dealt with later on. This will generate
notofication mails about each move, which I cannot disable from the GitHub
interface, so it will be a bit spammy. It looks like GitHub does not support
migration of the pull requests, therefore any open pull requests to the old
roles will be lost.
This also raises the question of using a centralized platform like GitHub or
GitLab for project development vs a dedicated mailing list which could
maintain an archive of normal discussions, discussions about new patches and
bug reports in a consistent and portable format.[2][3] I wonder how many
existing and potential DebOps users would be interested in such a change?
A GitHub and GitLab mirror of course would still be maintained, but perhaps
focus on development using a mailing list would work out better in the long
run? This could also focus discussion about DebOps development and usage on
the mailing list, move to a Mailman3 with newer web interface could also
help.
Don't worry, I don't plan to stop using GitHub issues and pull requests just
yet, just thinking aloud. :)
Cheers,
Maciej
[1]: https://github.com/debops/
[2]: https://git-send-email.io/
[3]: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html