The TURTLES checklist is a set of reminders to document when you come to archiving a project. Hopefully, by documenting a bit more at the time of archiving a project, it will serve as helpful context for those people who find (or come back) to the project in the future.
This GitHub repository contains a markdown TEMPLATE that you can use when archiving your own projects.
This approach of creating an archiving checklist was originally described by James Read in this blog post. This GitHub repository came afterwards, with a template, as it's a bit more usable for GitHub developers (and easier to contribute) than copying from the blog post.
- T — Technologists: Did enough people contribute to maintaining this project? Developers, Architects, Security, Operations?
- U — Users: Did this project have enough active users?
- R — Requirements: Was this project still doing what we set out for it to do?
- T — Technology: Are there any unsustainable technologies behind this project?
- L — Learning: Was anything being learned by maintaining this project?
- E — Ecosystem: Is there now an alternative to writing this project?
- S — Salvage: Can anything useful be salvaged from this project?
A full markdown TEMPLATE contains many more prompts under this same structure.
It is hoped that people who have found this useful will add links to their documented TURTLES checklist in the USAGE file.
The TURTLES checklist is just documentation - it is nothing more than a text file. However, if you want some sort of reference that you are using (or have used) the TURTLES checklist, for example as a reminder to developers, or to activate the GitHub "used by" feature, then you can depend against one of the dummy dependencies - go.mod for Golang, pom.xml for Java/Maven, etc.
This is of course entirely optional.