Net-SNMP is moving to GitHub -- Your input appreciated

[Wes H. <har...@us...>]

We have decided to move our Net-SNMP development to GitHub after many
wonderful years being hosted at SourceForge.  We greatly appreciate
SourceForge's support of open source projects over the years, but it's
time we take advantage of some features of GitHub that are unique and
should help us interact better with the community.  In particular, we
hope that GitHub's issues and pull system will allow us to more
flexibility in opening up development to more rapid integration by the
wider community.

* Things to consider

  1. code base
     - This is the easist task as git is decentralized.  The new
       codebase location is already up at:

     https://github.com/net-snmp/net-snmp

     One question about the code base is outstanding that we have not
     yet discussed enough to come to a conclusion about: whether we'll
     continue handling patches and forward pushes in the same way (IE,
     applying patches to the earliest supported branch and rolling
     them forward using merges).  Stay tuned, or better yet, offer
     your opinion.  Note that we've had great success with the merging
     mechanism as it has ensured us that no patch gets lost in an
     older version and that all patches are applied everywhere.  It's
     not the only way to do things though, but not losing patches
     while supporting older branches is an important feature
     consideration.

  2. issues/bugs/patches

     This is one that we'd love feedback on.  Our choices are something
     along the lines of:

     a. start from scratch and don't move anything?
     b. start from bugs after a certain date, figuring the oldest are
     likely out of date
     c. see if someone has written a SF -> github issue mover

  3. website

     Move the primary website to netsnmp.github.io (with the
     http://www.net-snmp.org/ domain name continuing to work of course).

  4. wiki

     Our plan at this point is to convert wiki text to markdown so we
     can move it over to github.  This is currently being worked on and
     we expect it will be "mostly" successful.

  5. mailing lists

     This is one of the hardest topics.  We've used the SF based mailing
     lists for years and they've been one of the strongest aspects of
     the Net-SNMP community.  We may pick one of:

     a. Leave the mailing lists at SourceForge
     b. Host them elsewhere and have everyone manually move over after an
       announcement
     c. Switch to discussing things in issues only
     d. Switch to forums

     I'm not in favor of c or d, but I care more that the community's
     voice makes the decision.

  6. downloads

     Github uses a different mechanism for distributing tarballs of
     downloads.  But I don't see an issue with this in the future.

  7. Use of GitHub's extra features (builds, testing, CI type things)

     We will plan on making use of some of the extra goodies, of
     course.  But concentration will first be to move the pieces so
     we spend less energy being fragmented during the transition.

* Timeline

  1. The current 5.7.4 and 5.8 releases will be the last that we'll
     push to the SourceForge git repository and filesystem.
     Hopefully.

  2. The new git repo at github is already up and being updated.

  3. Future releases will be done from github

  4. New issues, etc, should be submitted to the GitHub issues tracker
     from now onward

  5. As major things are completed (IE, documentation moves), we'll
     make appropriate announcements





-- 
Wes Hardaker
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