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Code Transfer Options

There are several ways in which contributors can transfer their project's code to the FINOS infrastructure team during contribution:

Use GitHub's transfer ownership capability to move it over to the project's GitHub organization. To do this, the contributor will need to temporarily add one of the project's's GitHub organization owners (e.g. the project maintainer) as an admin on the source repository, so that they can initiate the transfer. Once the code has been transfered, the contributor will be able (and is encouraged) to remove the project's GitHub organization owner from the repository.

FINOS recommends this approach as it has the unique benefit of preserving the full commit & pull request histories, the project's issue list, wiki and GitHub pages, and more.

Some important notes:

  1. When transferring a repository, its issues, wiki, stars, and watchers are also transferred (read more details about repository transfers)
  2. When transferring a private repository, all forks will be disabled, until marked as public; they will also be disconnected from the upstream repository, therefore it is strongly advised to push all changes to an upstream branch, before transferring the code

GitHub.com repository where it is not possible to temporarily configure someone else as an admin​

Perform a double transfer:

  1. Transfer ownership of the repository to a personal ("user") account on GitHub (see the GitHub documentation for details)
  2. Follow the steps described above for transferring a GitHub.com repository to the project

GitHub Enterprise repository​

Perform a copy, transfer, and freeze:

  1. Copy the repository into a personal ("user") account on GitHub (this StackOverflow post describes how to accomplish this)
  2. Follow the steps described above for transferring a GitHub.com repository to the project
  3. Delete or freeze (e.g. disable access, make read-only, etc.) the repository in your GitHub Enterprise installation, to prevent accidental modifications to the wrong repository.

Other Source Code Management (SCM) repository​

Perform an import, transfer, and freeze:

  1. Use the GitHub importer to import the repository into a personal ("user") account on GitHub (see the GitHub documentation for details)
  2. Follow the steps described above for transferring a GitHub.com repository to the project
  3. Delete or freeze (e.g. disable access, make read-only, etc.) the repository in your SCM installation, to prevent accidental modifications to the wrong repository.

Source code snapshot​

Snapshotting the code and providing it to the FINOS Infra team in an archive file (.zip, .tar.gz, etc.) can also work. This is the recommended approach if you wish to truncate the commit history prior to contribution.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY)​

If you wish to populate your repository yourself, the FINOS Infra team should create an empty repository in the project's GitHub organization (as described above), and then configure the contributing team as owners and committe