Moving to LocationTech, graduating from incubation: what will happen?

[Rob Emanuele]

Hello GeoTrellis community,

I'm announcing that we are soon to graduate from our incubation process at LocationTech and make the full switch to being a LocationTech project. This entails the following:

- Releasing GeoTrellis 1.0 under LocationTech, meaning we will be distributing our jars on LocationTech's nexus repository (not on maven central, unfortunately)

- Deprecating the Google Group mailing list, and moving completely to the LocationTech mailing lists.

- Moving our repository to the LocationTech GitHub organization.

The first point should be pretty opaque to users and developers; we will have to include an additional repository to our build files, but that's it. I'll expand on that when we release.

The second point, moving mailing lists, makes me concerned in that I hope we don't end up losing people who are subscribed to the google group and not the LocationTech lists. But, we need to consolidate where we are placing information, so we'll need to focus our efforts on the LocationTech list. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to the mailing list here https://locationtech.org/mailman/listinfo/geotrellis-user if you are a user, and here https://locationtech.org/mailman/listinfo/geotrellis-dev if you are a developer.

The third point is going to be more disruptive. This means that I will be handing over https://github.com/geotrellis/geotrellis to LocationTech, who will then

transfer it over to httsp://github.com/locationtech/geotrellis. Because of the way they handle IP issues, we will need to namespace all old commits under

an "_old" git namespace, and "master" will be the only branch that does not have that prefix. This includes tags. We will maintain lineage to our history, but with the

namespace rewrite, our commit history will be rewritten (similar to that of a rebase). This means that all PR's against the old version will no longer be valid. Luckily, we can cherry pick commits across the old and new history, so I should be able to construct PRs. It's a bit of a complicated process, but in the end our repository should look similar to how GeoMesa's does (https://github.com/locationtech/geomesa)

It's unclear what snags we and our users will hit after this move, and apologies in advance for the disruption. This is warning that it will happen, and a request that you bear with us as it does happen. I'll announce once the repository is moved. You might have to re-clone the repository at the new location at that point, or force update master and cherry pick commits across branches that were based on old master.

I'm hoping this will not be too painful, but we have to rip the band-aide off in this case as part of our LocationTech graduation. Once it happens, please let us know of any troubles you are having and we'll work through them together.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Rob

--

Robert Emanuele, Tech Lead
Azavea |  990 Spring Garden Street, 5th Floor, Philadelphia, PA
remanuele@azavea.com  | T 215.701.7502  | Web azavea.com  |  @azavea