Rename our GitHub organization to instructlab (drop the hyphen in name)

[lhawthorn]

@jeremyeder registered the GitHub organization name https://github.com/instructlab/

While it is not a show stopper by any means, from an ease of remembering the URL, https://github.com/instructlab/ is preferable to having to use a hyphen as we currently do https://github.com/instruct-lab/

Red Hatters also currently have project ownership for https://github.com/instructlab/ whereas we would need to do some work to get https://github.com/instruct-lab/ transferred to ownership by Red Hat.

Risks if we make this change

• We break existing links in documentation and elsewhere
• Someone else could squat https://github.com/instruct-lab (this is an easily solvable problem)
• API requests that use the old organization's name will return a 404 error. We would have to update the old organization name in API requests.
• There are no automatic @mention redirects for teams that use the old organization's name.

AIUI, repo mapping should we change our organization to https://github.com/instructlab/ would happen automagically and all repository history would be preserved. Relevant documentation on renaming organization settings.

Risks if we do nothing

• Our branding is not as great as it could be, but everyone will live

Other things to consider

• Our Slack instance lives at instruct-lab.slack.com, because instructlab.slack.com was taken, so we are already dealing with the hyphenation issue on another project property
• Renaming the organization has no impact on membership, so it would not serve as a solution for issue #65

For the sake of completely documenting the topic area, I am also an owner of https://github.com/instructlab/ and can create other owners if we decide to migrate to the non-hyphenated project name.

[lhawthorn]

Related to https://github.com/instruct-lab/cli/issues/817

[lhawthorn]

It is also possible to transfer repositories to other organization accounts per this documentation https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/transferring-a-repository h/t @tiran

[russellb]

+1 on moving to github.com/instructlab/

• consistency with the domain name
• consistency with the most common way it has been written that I'm seeing -- InstructLab -- not "Instruct Lab" or "instruct-lab"

Opening would be a convenient time to do this. In other words, keep the private stuff here, and as we open, transfer them to the new org. It'll keep the private/public stuff cleanly separated as we work through the rest of the issues opening all repos.

[russellb]

I've been doing a lot of github admin work, partly to work on automation / bot integration, but also more generally. I am available to help work through all of the administrative actions necessary to facilitate this process. I'll just need to be added as an owner of the new org as well. @jeremyeder

[russellb]

Related: https://huggingface.co/instruct-lab was just created too

[bjhargrave]

+1 on renaming org to instructlab.

[lehors]

So, I'm in favor of the renaming too but I've got to ask:

Has anyone considered starting with fresh repos rather than transferring the existing ones?

I mean: start with a new set of repos within the new org, each with a first commit corresponding to the HEAD of the main branch of the existing repos. We then archive the old ones, and everybody switches to the new ones.

It does require a bit of coordination but that's been done before. The main downside of that is to not carry over any history but the case can be made that this might be a good thing in this case.

[bjhargrave]

The main downside of that is to not carry over any history

You would lose more than just git commit history. You also lose GitHub issue and pull request history. But maybe that is a feature and not a bug :-)

[lehors]

The main downside of that is to not carry over any history

You would lose more than just git commit history.

Yes, of course.

You also lose GitHub issue and pull request history. But maybe that is a feature and not a bug :-)

Exactly.

[russellb]

The main downside of that is to not carry over any history

You would lose more than just git commit history.

Yes, of course.

You also lose GitHub issue and pull request history. But maybe that is a feature and not a bug :-)

Exactly.

I would strongly prefer preserving all history unless there are very, very good reasons we absolutely can NOT do so.

[lhawthorn]

Agreed by project leads in Slack (and we're going to be very good about making sure these convos happen in public Slack as soon as we open the project repos), we are renaming our GitHub organization from instruct-lab to instructlab.

@russellb has graciously agreed to do this migration as part of opening the repos.

I will update the issue name to clarify that the decision has been made and assign it to @russellb since he will perform the migration.

[russellb]

As a first step, prior to migrating repos, I need to build up the org membership and the various teams used for repo access controls. I plan to add everyone who has been active to the new org. If you don't get an invite by the end of Thursday, Apr 18, please check back here for status. If you don't see a comment indicating something has changed schedule-wise, please contact me (on slack, ideally).

[russellb]

change of plan -- i'm just going to rename the existing github org. This will be much easier.

[russellb]

The organization has been renamed to instructlab -- old URLs should all automatically redirect.