Find strategy to make Jekyll theme repositories useful templates without forking

[matthewfeickert]

I think that creating a cookiecutter (or maybe there is a Ruby equivalent — a question for Henry probably) makes more sense for achieving what the design goal seems to be here, as otherwise all the projects are tied to each other forever (unless you email GitHub support for each individual repo and ask them to sever the "fork" tie between things). This isn't necessarily "bad", but once projects start to deviate then it can start to become a bit strange to have large deviations in the commit history from the parent project and the fork if there isn't any plan for reunification in the future.

Originally posted by @matthewfeickert in UW-Madison-DSI#11 (comment)

[matthewfeickert]

@cranmer While I'd still like to find a better strategy, for the time being I've enabled the "Template repository" setting in https://github.com/UW-Madison-DSI/uw-jekyll-theme/settings

so that people can create a new repository with the same structure by clicking the "Use this template" button now added, without the problems of having the "fork" connection to the parent project.

GitHub docs: https://docs.github.com/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/creating-a-repository-from-a-template

[cranmer]

Nice! That’s close to the cookie cutter approach. Thanks! Message ID: ***@***.***>

[matthewfeickert]

unless you email GitHub support for each individual repo and ask them to sever the "fork" tie between things

I have a ticket open with GitHub to detach this repo (https://github.com/UW-Madison-DSI/uw-jekyll-theme/) from its fork parent https://github.com/cranmer/cranmer-lab as the commit history divergence is going to become large without any plan to reconcile them.

[matthewfeickert]

My ticket has been resolved and so https://github.com/UW-Madison-DSI/uw-jekyll-theme has now been "extracted to a new network" and so is no longer connected to https://github.com/cranmer/cranmer-lab as a fork.