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

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Dear all,

Thank you for all of your comments! To do a consolidated reply:

> On 7 December 2016 at 16:22, Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Good point.  It would be useful to clarify this scope though, since the governance doc makes several references to "code repositories" that are all hosted
in the GitHub ocaml/ org.  So it seems quite relevant to organise those code repositories under the same framework as the rest of the infrastructure that they eventually drive.

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

What particular difficulties did you have in mind with extending it to cover the management of code?

> On 8 Dec 2016, at 09:28, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net> wrote:
> 
> Just to make it clear to everyone: 
> The forge will be deprecated but I haven't made an official statement about it (pending). The official recommendation will be to migrate projects to Github, but I'll keep a STATIC website of the forge -- for the project that have no plan to migrate.
<...>
> Mass migration under an organisation is still an option for the Forge migration but:
> - it will generate quite a lot of work
> - lot of long discussions (some project may not want to be mass migrated to github, but would prefer GitLab or other)
> - probably only 20 migrated repositories will be active afterward

Keeping a static copy of the existing Forge would be very useful. Regarding mass migration, I was thinking of simply git cloning the existing repositories into a mirror namespace on GitHub, and doing nothing further.  Individual maintainers from the Forge could then be granted write access and/or the repositories transferred if they choose, but at a minimum simply keeping a copy of code, history and tags would provide OPAM with a useful mirror alternative to the Forge.

If maintainers do want GitLab, they will have to host it themselves...

On 8 Dec 2016, at 12:55, Gemma Gordon <gg417 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> ​I wanted to help but wasn't sure how to begin with.

Thanks for jumping in here, Gemma!  To be clear, we ("infrastructure") welcome anyone who wishes to help maintain the growing set of repositories, so please do feel free to ask clarification questions about anything that is undocumented or otherwise confusing.

> Based on comments here I've added a list of all of the repositories currently within the ocaml/ organisation to an /infrastructure/ wiki page: https://github.com/ocaml/infrastructure/wiki/OCaml-Project-Repositories so we can easily see what is there and where we might organise things.

I've edited this to add some more information.  It would be good to have a short page about infrastructure on ocaml.org as well -- would you (or anyone else on the thread) have suggestions for where to put this on the website?  I'm keen to avoid wiki proliferation and have one place on ocaml.org where people can be directed to this kind of information.

> 
> The infrastructure wiki might be a good place to provide more of an overview of the OCaml ecosystem, and not just machine resources. Some ideas/questions: 
> 
> * We can pin 6 of the main repositories to the OCaml organisation page as per the Mirage organisation page: https://github.com/mirage 

Sounds good; how about:

ocaml
ocaml-manual
ocamlbuild
opam
opam-repository
ocaml.org

This covers the core compiler, OPAM and the website.

> 
> * The wiki: https://github.com/ocaml/infrastructure/wiki is a little out of date - perhaps we could refresh/reorganise it?

My fault I'm afraid. I'll take a pass a bit later on...

> * Rather than migrating, we can link to other OCaml libraries that are relevant to the core ocaml.org ecosystem such as https://github.com/ocaml-doc, https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin that are incorporated within their own organisations
> * Shall we link to other third party libraries that are important/relevant to the core compiler? e.g. Spacetime, AFL 

This is a very good point.  One of my concerns is that the various new features in OCaml are quite spread out now. Spacetime's implementation is on [either Leo or Jane Street] person repos, the ocaml-doc is its own organisation, and so on.

Would there be any objection to also starting discussions with various maintainers about migrating in "headline" projects such as Spacetime UIs into the ocaml/ org?  I'd suggest only doing this once the feature is in a released compiler distribution, since then the maintenance burden is established for some time.

Thanks again for all the rapid and helpful responses, Amir, Sylvain and Gemma.

regards,
Anil