Feature Proposal: Use GitHub "Releases" feature to distribute Foswiki

Motivation

We've gotten some pushback about using SourceForge for releases due to some policy changes over the past years, which has them inserting ad-ware and other pollution into some windows based installers. Although it doesn't impact us directly, it has taken a hit on SourceForge reputation, and we have had a couple of people complaining about our choice of SourceForge.

Also we are dependent upon SourceForge as our sole distribution site. Adding GitHub releases would give us some backup if SourceForge has another major outage like happened this past summer right around our Foswiki 2.0 release.

Description and Documentation

Help needed to convert from TML to Markdown, so we only need to build one topic related to the release information.

We might also explore using github to host extension releases.

Examples

See https://github.com/foswiki/distro/releases

Each "Tag" created can also be a "Release". If we do nothing, a link to a zip / tarball of the raw source is created. So anyone who finds the release tags might accidentally download an "un-built" release.

Impact

Primary impact is extra work for the upload of each new release.

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

• Convert the TML release topic to Markdown for hosting on github
• Drag/drop each file to the github release page.

-- Contributors: GeorgeClark - 23 Dec 2015

Discussion

Essentially I'm in favour.

I'd check github docs carefully, you may find you can create an HTML page (albeit with limitations) maybe embedded in markdown.

My main concern is to automate the process to create the github release page from our own topics — don't want to burden our RM with more work

Note that I'm working on https://github.com/Jlevens/FoswikiIntegration. I really want to see this move towards automating a lot of our build processes. In the short term I'm focussed on analysing all the foswiki github repos for issues and comparing them against the Extensions web for discrepancies.

The next step will be to generate FoswikiVagrant scripts to build new VM based envs with whatever Extensions you choose to work OOTB.

Another item on the list is to enable the support of different versions of extensions on f.o. (no idea how to implement this yet).

-- JulianLevens - 06 Jan 2016

Possible automation (at least partial). I just tried the pandoc converter, e.g.

 pandoc -f twiki -t markdown_github < /..../System/InstallationGuide.txt >temp.md

Even if the result is far from 100% - it is pretty usable - and imho reduces the needed work.

If interested, could check the result of the conversion here: https://github.com/jomo666/Foswiki2MarkdownTest

-- JozefMojzis - 06 Jan 2016

Actually, we get a "Release" page on github whether we want it or not. Tags are releases. I've put up https://github.com/foswiki/distro/releases/tag/FoswikiRelease02x01x00 as a trial. We can continue with the manual building of releases on github, it's not much more effort than the sourceforge upload.

-- GeorgeClark - 09 Feb 2016

I'm going to mark this under construction. The last two releases are now on github, but the download topic doesn't link to them.

-- GeorgeClark - 20 Mar 2016

Closing this. The Download template can now show either the github or sourceforge downloads.

-- GeorgeClark - 28 Apr 2016

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