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Moving code hosting to GitHub

 

All,

In an effort to speed up our code development processes, reduce the
friction amongst existing contributors and reduce barriers to entry
for new contributors familiar with the popular git DVCS, we (the
OpenStack@Rackspace team) have been studying a transition of our code
hosting from Launchpad to GitHub. We understand others would be
proposing the same at the design summit, but we figured it would be
good to get the discussion started earlier.

GitHub has a number of major strengths when it comes to managing source code:
- Contributors seem to be more familiar with, and comfortable using, git
- The code review process on GitHub is easier to use for reviewers
  who use the website interface and allows for fine-grained comment
  control per line in diffs

As good as the GitHub review system is, there are some deficiencies,
such as the lack of ability to mark a request as definitively
approved. We hope to work with the GitHub team to investigate how this
can be rectified.

Of course, there is much more to delivering a professionally released
open source software package than just the code hosting platform. This
is the primary interface for code contributors who are actively
developing, but the project also needs to have processes in place for
handling bug reports, managing distribution, packaging, translations,
and releasing the code in an efficient manner.

There are a number of things that Launchpad provides OpenStack
projects that GitHub does not have the ability to do. Examples of
these things include translation services, project management
abilities, package archives for projects, and release-management
functionality.

Therefore, at this time, we are only proposing moving the code hosting
functionality to GitHub, and not radically changing any other parts of
the development and release process.

Soren, Monty, and Thierry, who are the developers responsible for
keeping our release management and development infrastructure in good
shape, have identified the pieces of our existing infrastructure that
they will have to modify. Some of these changes are small, some
require a bit more work. They are all committed to making these
changes and to moving us along in the process of transitioning code
hosting over to GitHub.

There will be a design summit session about this transition where the
process will be discussed in more detail, as well as the possibility
to migrate other parts of our infrastructure.

Comments and discussion welcome.

Cheers,
-jay



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