Add an OEP-2 compliant openedx.yaml file

[cpennington]

This adds an openedx.yaml file, as described by OEP-2: http://open-edx-proposals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/oeps/oep-0002.html

The data in this file was transformed from the contents of edx/repo-tools-data:repos.yaml

[cpennington]

@edx/teaching-and-learning: I've tagged your team as the owner of this repo. Ok to merge?

I've also marked the repo as being obsolete.

[cahrens]

@cpennington what is the process for deleting repos?

[andy-armstrong]

@cahrens It seems that there isn't a way to deprecate or delete repos once they are public. I guess that fits with it being open source. Many folks have been asking for deprecation support for a while:

https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144

[pmitros]

github does support deleting repos, including public ones, but it is almost always a mistake. It would, in particular, be a serious mistake for something which has been used in production. E.g. ORA1 is obsolete, but people may want to look at it to understand what happened in those runs.

EASE isn't obsolete, so much as unmaintained. It's still pretty much at state-of-the-art for text classification. It would be a very substantial investment to redevelop should we need it again, and a pretty small investment to update the code to account for bit rot. There's a fair amount of interest in it outside of edX as well. Deleting it would be a serious mistake.

Speaking of useful repos, whatever happened to the discern? All references to it seem to have disappeared. Google still autocompletes to http://code.edx.org/discern/, but the page disappeared, as apparently did our copy of the github repo...

[cpennington]

@pmitros: I can see a useful distinction between unmaintained and obsolete, although this repo might be the only place where we use unmaintained rather than obsolete.

[nasthagiri]

Does github allow us to "move" the repo to another location so we can archive the repos for reference, but not have them clutter our list of repos on edX?

[cpennington]

Yes, we could potentially have another org that has legacy or unmaintained repositories.

[pmitros]

One nice feature of github is it orders repos by date of last commit. At least in the main listing, old repos automatically move to the end. It is more of a hassle for automated tools and similar, though.

Moving to a new org definitely beats removing, but there are good reasons to keep URIs the same, over the long term. If someone wants to e.g. install a snapshot of a platform from 2013, and all the URIs changed, it becomes neigh impossible. There are also other open source users, potentially, etc.

[robrap]

The simplest option for humans may be to have a template for adding a prominent warning to the top of the README. I would use something like "important", and have this even before the description of the repo.

[andy-armstrong]

👍

[pmitros]

@cahrens @cpennington @andy-armstrong If this repo is, indeed, completely obsolete or deprecated, do feel free to transfer it to github.com/pmitros. That would decouple it from edX, but github would provide a forwarding link, and all the git metadata would be maintained.

[robrap]

@jibsheet @nasthagiri: Here is one of the conversations regarding archiving repos. I don't know if some of the comments apply only because @pmitros thinks this repo is still useful, and whether we'd have different solutions for ORA and Discussions.

Also, @jibsheet, I thought you determined that this was in use by ORA2? I'm not sure why @cahrens was originally proposing deleting this repo?

[jibsheet]

@robrap I saw it in https://github.com/edx/edx-ora2/blob/master/requirements/base.txt#L30

[jibsheet]

Also, github does redirects, even across organizations, and subsequent renames. We make use of this feature all the time. So old URLs would continue to work (including git urls in git remotes).