Moving to Github

The Xibo Project has been hosted on Launchpad since December 2008 and we appreciate the excellent platform that has been provided free of charge over that time. Bazaar is an excellent version control system and the Bug reporting on Launchpad has been perfect for our needs up until now. However, as the project has grown we have very quickly realised we need to do all we can do to encourage contribution to the platform. With only 2 main contributors to date and a handful of occasional helpers, we have struggled to push forwards with our plans, fix bugs and get new software released in a timely fashion.

Xibo is essentially a PHP/.NET/Python project and these types of developers are far more abundant on Github than they are on Launchpad – and of course many developers are now learning Git as standard, rather than Bazaar. Therefore we have taken the difficult decision to move most of the project over to Github, starting with the stable release of 1.7.0.

Details for Users

The only difference to end users will be the location to get support and report problems. The old Launchpad Answers system will be replaced by Github Issues. The Answers system in Launchpad will still be active, but only for historical viewing. It will not be monitored for new issues. FAQs and Tutorial articles will be available in the User Manual.

Details for Developers

All new development and maintenance of existing releases will be managed on Github. The following transitions will occur immediately after the release of 1.7.0.

Code

The Source code will be transferred from Bazaar to Git and hosted on Github in a repository per component. This means there will be a repository for the CMS, one for the Windows Player, one for the Ubuntu Player, etc. There will be a central repository which glues everything together and provides an overview of the repository layout.

All active branches in Launchpad will be marked as abandoned, but where new Git repositories are created Launchpad Branches will be created to mirror “master” in those repositories.

Bugs and Features

Bugs and Features will be tracked using Github Issues. Features will be documented as a Blueprint on a Github Wiki located on the central repository. We will be porting over selected bugs and blueprints in the weeks following the migration.

Collaboration

Forking and submitting Pull Requests will be used as standard by the project development team and by any outside contributions.

Translations

Launchpad will contain a mirrored branch for each release and for the current development effort so that Translations can continue to occur in Launchpad.

Timing and Questions

We are planning to make the migration at the end of January 2015 to coincide with the release of our new stable 1.7.0 software . If anyone has any feedback on this migration please feel free to raise an issue on Github. It is our great hope that this move will increase the collaboration, increase exposure and ultimately result in a better product which is updated more frequently.