Thursday 26 January 2017

Announcing: MapGuide Maestro is moving to GitHub

After some thoughts and considerations, I've decided to move MapGuide Maestro out of the MapGuide Open Source SVN repo and out into its own GitHub repository.

The primary motivation was performance (git is way faster than svn and enables more productive development) and secondly, the "pull request" model of GitHub and other DVCSes is more conductive to external contributions than what we currently have now, which is code sitting as a sub-project in a SVN repository that requires special vetting and access for commit access to be granted.

Whereas with GitHub and friends it's just fork the repository, make your changes and send back a pull request. At no point in the above process do I ever have to get involved beyond reviewing and accepting any pull requests that comes my way. Less administrative burden on my end, less bureaucratic road blocks for external contributions on yours. Win win for everyone!

As of this post, I will cease to make any more Maestro-related commits to the SVN repo, I'll be migrating all Maestro-related issues and wiki content over to GitHub. Do not make anymore Maestro-related issues/tickets on the MapGuide Trac instance, make them on the GitHub project instead. Once the migration of issues and wiki content has completed, I'll remove Maestro from the SVN repo. Old releases will stay on the OSGeo download server, but new ones will be on GitHub.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Great Jackie. I hope to be able to contribute in the future. I have lots of things nagging me when using the Maestro editor and I should be able to fix them myself.

mapNinja said...

Seems like a well-considered, smart and sensible move.
Thanks and appreciation for your ongoing contributions to the project.

Johan Van de Wauw said...

You are probably not the person to ask, but anyway.
We should really consider migrating all of mapguide/fdo to git, removing the binary dependencies.

There are some tools such as https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/ that could help doing so.

Jackie Ng said...

It's not just mapguide/fdo

There's also fusion and cs-map, that are also upstream SVN dependencies.

Then you need buy-in from Autodesk that they are fine with the move to git as they use these repos as the base for their commerical products.

I'd love nothing more than to move MapGuide and friends to git. But there's technical and organization hurdles to overcome. And I *really* don't want to have to be the one to do everything, even though that has been the case thus far.