For contributors: unifying to fewer GitHub repos

[natemcmaster]

Please use this issue for discussion.

Over the next few months, we will reduce the number of repos in active development in the @aspnet organization by merging them together. We plan to condense about 53 repos into 5. Repos which merge with another will be archived on GitHub, which makes them read-only. We will also rename a few repositories. GitHub will automatically redirect URLs to issues and commits on renamed repositories. We will update the README and repo descriptions to help you navigate from archived repos to the new repo.

After the merging is complete, the final set of repos will be as follows:

Repo	Primary purpose
aspnet/AspNetCore	ASP.NET Core runtime
aspnet/AspNetCore-Tooling	Tools for ASP.NET Core (MSBuild, Visual Studio, command line tools, etc.)
aspnet/Extensions	Microsoft.Extensions.* APIs
aspnet/EntityFrameworkCore	Entity Framework Core
aspnet/AspLabs	Experiments not ready for production releases

To preserve as much history as possible, we will rename aspnet/Home to aspnet/AspNetCore, and aspnet/Common to aspnet/Extensions instead of creating new repos. We will preserve commit history by merging unrelated histories into the unified repos. We will also review open issues and move them when necessary to keep them aligned with the relevant code.

Motivation

Our primary motivation is simplifying both our engineering systems and our GitHub interactions with all of you. We know there are some drawbacks to working in larger repos, but we find the benefits compelling enough to move forward with this change. The new set of repos more closely aligns with the layering of the products they ship.

Timeframe

We'll be starting the first round of changes soon. We expect the entire unification effort will take us several weeks. We'll migrate repositories in phases and adjust the plan along the way, as necessary.

Archived repos

The following repos will be merged into the main repos above. They will not be used any more for active development on 2.1 LTS and new releases. The source code for the projects will move to the new project with any issues we intend to keep working on. Remaining issues and pull requests will be closed. We do not plan to delete the repos or remove tagged commits, but the projects will become read-only.

• AADIntegration
• Antiforgery
• AuthSamples
• AzureIntegration
• BasicMiddleware
• BrowserLink
• Caching
• Common
• Configuration
• CORS
• DataProtection
• DependencyInjection
• Diagnostics
• DotNetTools
• EventNotification
• FileSystem
• Hosting
• HtmlAbstractions
• HttpAbstractions
• HttpClientFactory
• HttpSysServer
• Identity
• IISIntegration
• JavaScriptServices
• JsonPatch
• KestrelHttpServer
• Localization
• Logging
• MetaPackages
• Microsoft.Data.Sqlite
• MusicStore
• Mvc
• MvcPrecompilation
• Options
• Proxy
• Razor
• ResponseCaching
• Routing
• Scaffolding
• Security
• ServerTests
• Session
• SignalR
• StaticFiles
• Templating
• Testing
• Universe
• WebHooks
• WebSockets

Please use dotnet/aspnetcore#3598 for discussion.