Use GitHub's new "repository templates" feature & adapt ReadMe's of suitable repos

[katrinleinweber]

Please read https://github.blog/2019-06-06-generate-new-repositories-with-repository-templates/. It seems to fit perfectly to the following Carpentries repos, doesn't it?

[davidrpugh]

I was thinking the same. As far as I can tell, the benefit would be to simplify the process of creating a new repo for users: there would no longer be any need to import an existing repository, users would only need to click the create repo from template button.

What other benefits am I missing?

[katrinleinweber]

I think that's the one benefit.

It might be worth discussing whether or not we should make it easyier to create new lessons, or whether the current "import barrier" should remain, in order to keep the nudging contributors towards the existing lessons.

workshop-template is clear a clear case, IMHO: convert into repo template, in order to make it easier. I emailed GitHub support a suggestion to also allow "spawning" of issues prepared in the template repo, so that common tasks can be tracked as issues, instead of using the non-interactive checklist.

[fmichonneau]

Cross posting from slack thread:

I've looked into a little and I enabled it on the workshop-website repo so it can be used there. A few things to note: when creating a repository using this template approach, the repo inherits from GitHub defaults instead of the original repository. It means that, for instance, the default branch becomes master (instead of gh-pages) and GitHub pages isn't enabled (so as the repo creator you'll need to enable it to get your workshop website to render). Additionally, the history of the repository is lost. This means that it could be a little harder to patch workshop websites in the future but this is quite minor given that I don't think it happens very often. At this stage, for the workshop-website purposes, I think it makes sense to keep using the import function given that it means less setup to do for users. I'll keep this feature in mind for other uses though. If you do want to try out using repository templates (and even better document the process), feel free to do so!