[ocaml-infra] new Github projects under the "ocaml" organization

[Amir Chaudhry]

> On 7 Dec 2016, at 15:28, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
> 
> On 7 Dec 2016, at 15:14, Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy at inria.fr> wrote:
>> On 12/07/2016 03:43 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>>> On 7 Dec 2016, at 14:15, Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy at inria.fr> wrote:
>> 
>>>> So, what is the policy?  how to request a new /ocaml/xxx project?
>>>> who takes the decision?
>>> 
>>> Technically speaking, you own the final say on the namespace,
>>> so you make the decision in case of conflict :-)
>> 
>> Not sure!  Before posting I re-read the governance document, in
>> case my questions were already answered there.  According to this
>> document, I do own the final say on hostnames in the ocaml.org domain.
>> But the Github ocaml/ organization & namespace is something different,
>> not covered (yet?) in the governance document.
>> 
>> I suspect that, as one of the admins of this organization, I wield
>> considerable technical power there as well.  But I definitely don't
>> want to misuse or abuse it, hence my questions re: policy and
>> procedure.
> 
> Dear Xavier,
> 
> Good point -- I will put GitHub on the list of things to add to the
> governance doc. We also need somewhere to stash private keys
> for infrastructure machines as well, so there are a few other items
> of that nature that warrant a refresh.

The governance doc was specifically written for the ocaml.org domain.
Of course, it can be modified and extended to cover other things but the management and policy around code repos was not part of the original scope.

I mention this in case anyone think it’ll be a trivial thing to add :)

>>> So far, the policy has been any project that is reasonably needed
>>> for the operation of the ocaml.org infrastructure. Some of them are
>>> obvious: [...]
>>> When we first created the GitHub org, it was also the home for
>>> some popular community libraries: [...]
>>> More recently of course, the OCaml compiler and its tools have 
>>> also started moving over: [...]
>>> 
>>> So now that we have been using GitHub for a few years, there
>>> is quite an array of libraries on the ocaml/ organisation, and
>>> possibly time to do a garbage collection and disaggregate the
>>> namespace if necessary.
>> 
>> As far as the number of projects in ocaml/ remains tractable
>> (e.g. tens, not hundreds), it's OK to host all of them and not
>> worry too much about reorganization.  My (hypothetical) concern is:
>> what happens do if, say, all projects from forge.ocamlcore.org ask to
>> migrate to the /ocaml/ organization on Github?
> 
> I have been wondering about this also.  Perhaps we should 
> take the initiative and create an ocaml-forge organisation that
> mirrors the existing Forge Git repositories?
> We cannot do much about issues, but it's fairly straightforward to
> mirror the source code.  SVN will require an authoritative mirror
> since the results of SVN2Git aren't always reproducible.

IIRC Forge offers multiple features: Code, Mailing lists, and Issues.

— Code —
I would think that the correct analogy for this aspect of Forge would be GitHub itself. i.e. the maintainers move their repos/code to their own namespaces/orgs on GitHub.

Some of those would make sense to move to /ocaml but that would involve a case-by-case discussion between the owners of /ocaml (i.e. you) and the maintainers of those codebases.  

Mirroring the existing Git repos into an ‘ocaml-forge’ organisation, as Anil suggests, might also be a good way to facilitate a mass migration.

As a sidenote, there are benefits and trade-offs to moving projects into a GitHub organisation.  For example, the owners of a GitHub organisation have push access to all the repositories within their org, which is worth bearing in mind.  On the other hand, managing teams and collaborators is a little easier from within an organisation. Projects could make their own organisations if they wish — e.g. Merlin lives under an organisation rather than an individual’s account, https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin.  

— Mailing lists —
It's possible to set up mailing lists on lists.ocaml.org and move archives over.  This has happened before so I don’t imagine any difficulties, other than logistics.

— Issues —
As Anil said, I’m not sure there’s much to be done about Issue Trackers and Task lists.


> In Merlin's case, Fred also provided the mailing list archive,
> so that has been migrated to lists.ocaml.org now:
> https://github.com/ocaml/infrastructure/issues/5
> 
>>> It would be great to keep the [libraries formerly in the compiler
>>> distribution] underneath the ocaml/ organisation.  There is also
>>> precedent for moving important core libraries such as Zarith into
>>> ocaml/
>> 
>> Duly noted.  But Nums and Zarith were two easy examples :-)
>> 
>> Concretely: I'll try to work on the otherlibs/num -> ocaml/num[s]
>> migration in the coming weeks, and will ask for help if I can't
>> manage.  For other possible "immigrant" projects, let's give other
>> people on this list time to think about it.
> 
> Makes sense.  I am also CCing Sylvain onto this thread in case
> he is not on the Infrastructure list.

Since Sylvain is listed as Maintainer for a sub-domain he should already be on the infrastructure list :)

Best wishes,
Amir