[Mpi-forum] Time To Open Source MPI

[Wesley Bland]

Hi folks,

** Look at the numbered list for your action items before 2020-02-18! **

Since we moved from Subversion to GitHub, there’s been a back and forth on whether the MPI Standard Source code should be open source or closed source. As you know (since most of you have access to it, we decided to keep the standard closed for a few reasons (avoiding rogue copies of the Standard was a big one), but recently, the scales have tipped back toward open sourcing and after talking to Bill and Martin some more, we think it’s finally time to open up the MPI Standard repository. Specifically, these are the issues that get addressed by moving to a public repository:

* Participation to the forum has a barrier to entry (i.e. me)
* Our current automated testing system is broken and will not be fixed
* We rely on special dispensation from GitHub for free, private repositories

I’ll be discussing this in more detail in Portland, but I want to make folks aware that this is coming now because it will have some impact on people who are actively working on text proposals. The mitigations here should be pretty straightforward and I have both slides (for a high level) and a wiki page (for details) on what’s happening and what you need to do about it.

The short version for the purpose of this email and your action item leading up the forum next week is to do two things:

1. Back up your branches.
2. Make a note for each of your open pull requests on where the are and what issues they’re attached to.

Detailed notes and the slides I’ll present in Portland on how to do this are here: https://github.com/mpi-forum/mpi-issues/wiki/Migrate-to-Public-Repository

The plan is for me to flip this switch DURING THE FEBRUARY MEETING! This should not disrupt any readings for the meeting itself as none of the pull requests will actually be deleted, but they will all become stale and we’ll need to re-open new ones. The main benefit of doing this during the meeting is that if/when anyone has trouble, I’ll be there in person to provide live help to anyone else that’s there (sorry, Marc-Andre, you’ll need to follow my slides remotely 😀).

Please email me if you have questions or concerns. If there’s enough demand, I’d even be willing to do a short Virtual Meeting on this on Wednesday.

Thanks,
Wesley
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