Migrating this lesson to the Workbench in 2025

[tobyhodges]

Hi lesson maintainers! 👋 as announced on The Carpentries blog earlier this week, the Curriculum Team will cease support for our previous lesson infrastructure (https://github.com/carpentries/styles) in The Carpentries Incubator at the end of 2025. After 31 December, any lessons remaining in the Incubator with the previous infrastructure will be archived.

Next steps

We describe a few possible courses of action you can take this year:

1. Get help with migrating this lesson

If you want to keep developing this lesson in The Carpentries Incubator, please migrate it to use The Carpentries Workbench this year. The Curriculum Team can help you with this: we are hosting monthly Lesson Transition Coworking Sessions where you can come and work on migrating your lesson with support, or if you prefer you can open an issue on the carpentries/lesson-transition repository to request that we do the initial transition for you. (More details of the process, coworking sessions, etc are in the blog post linked above.)

2. Transfer your lesson out of the Incubator

The Workbench provides several accessibility and usability improvements over the previous infrastructure, and we really do recommend that you transition to use it if possible. However, if you cannot or do not want to migrate this lesson to The Carpentries Workbench, you could transfer the project out of the Incubator to another GitHub organization/user. Any one of you with Admin access to the repository can initiate this transfer via the Danger Zone in the repository general settings.

We would prefer not to see you go, though! Please respond on this thread if you have questions or concerns so that we can better understand your need for the previous infrastructure. If you do transfer the repository out of the Incubator, please contact the Curriculum Team to let us know so that we can adjust our internal records.

3. Archive or delete the repository

If you no longer have interest or capacity to continue developing this lesson, you can archive or delete the repository altogether. As a rule of thumb, we recommend archiving a project with some history of development in case somebody else in the community wants to revive the project in the future (the Lesson Developer Handbook contains some advice on steps you can take before archiving the lesson). If you never really got started with developing the lesson, i.e. it has little or no commit history/drafted content, please delete the repository instead.

In either case, please contact the Curriculum Team to let us know that you are archiving/deleting your repository so that we can adjust our internal records.

Thanks so much for being part of The Carpentries Incubator community! ❤️