Hi everyone, after the move to github and source code modularization (cool), the previous sling repository apache/sling [0] is now empty. Except for a readme that currently mostly addresses active committers (few, experts that know the context) rather than users of sling (many, newbies that see Sling code for the first time). It was renamed to apache/sling-old-svn-mirror. Old links – if they include a branch or revision will still work, including trunk – which is good.
However, sling now doesn't have a good github "landing" repository anymore. You know, a central place that tells you where to find the code, which is now scattered across many repos, or that allows you to browse it without knowing exactly what to search for. Currently the very well hidden answers are [1] and [2], which aren't obvious. When hitting apache/sling, you find a readme that links to the project info page [3] that among many other links and lots of texts has a link to [1], which is hard to find IMO and has too many steps. Furthermore, [1] is not curated and depends on whatever result order sling gives you. But it might be very useful to categorize the repos, say all "resource resolver" related stuff, or extensions. Oliver Lietz built [5] based on automatic processing of [2], but it's also not curated and hard to find things if you don't know exactly how things are split up and named. My humble suggestion would be: 1. restore the apache/sling named repo, since that should help with SEO and "keeping" the existing brand 2. have a readme in there as the github landing page, just like any github project nowadays, which should include an about project and most information how to use sling/download it, find source repos and how to build it. Similar to the project information page [3], but more easily digestible with less text. 3. move the aggregator [2] to apache/sling, as that feels like a natural place (since this all happens on the new "master" branch, there is no conflict with the old sling code base in there) 4. have a curated list of repos in there (could be a separated markdown prominently linked from the main readme given its size), which would provide some categorization and e.g. start with the important stuff at the top. Guidelines for creating new repos/changing repos should hint at updating this readme. But even if it's not 100% up to date all the time, the vast majority of repos that don't change over time will be explorable. WDYT? FYI, this was initially discussed on [4]. I was always looking at Sling source code on github before, searching, reading, looking at the version history, even when it was "just" a mirror of the svn. When you were only reading, this didn't matter, and github's web view is so much better than the svn web view. I believe many folks did the same. The switch now is a bit of a break in that approach, if you can't easily find the source code anymore. [0] https://github.com/apache/sling [1] https://github.com/apache/?q=sling [2] https://github.com/apache/sling-aggregator [3] https://sling.apache.org/project-information.html#source-repository [4] https://github.com/apache/sling-old-svn-mirror/commit/9c14db46650bd9b6017511e8a61d021e17b4e1d2#commitcomment-26941906 [5] https://oliverlietz.github.io/apache-sling-aggregator/ Cheers, Alex
