End of Support for Our Previous Lesson Infrastructure

Following the January 2025 announcement that The Carpentries would sunset support for our previous lesson infrastructure, styles, at the end of last year, the Curriculum Team has been archiving repositories that had not migrated to The Carpentries Workbench over the last few weeks.

All of our official lessons had been expertly transitioned by Zhian Kamvar, our former Lesson Infrastructure Developer and architect of the Workbench, during the initial rollout of the new tooling in 2023. By the beginning of 2025, the majority of the community’s lessons in The Carpentries Incubator and Carpentries Lab had either been created with the Workbench or already been converted to use it. This included many that were migrated to the Workbench during a hackathon session at CarpentryConnect Heidelberg 2024, led by Aleksandra Nenadic and Matthew Bluteau.

Over the last twelve months, more lesson developers either transitioned their repositories to the Workbench, following our migration workflow, or requested that the Curriculum Team make the transition for them.

What went well?

I am delighted with the results: at the time of writing, The Carpentries Incubator includes 136 lesson repositories that are using the Workbench infrastructure, with transition pending on 14 more repositories. 63 lesson repositories have been archived, many of which were dormant or had received no commits since their initial creation. The Curriculum Team has transitioned 15 Incubator and Lab repositories to the Workbench since 2025, and a handful more where we received requests for help from projects outside of The Carpentries.

What was difficult?

The transition of an existing lesson from styles to the Workbench is a complex and delicate process. Community members reported that the documented workflow was difficult to follow and too sensitive to differences in the local computing environment. These factors created a greater dependency on the Curriculum Team to support lesson transitions.

Thankfully, once successfully configured, the lesson transition process was usually very fast. The Curriculum Team developed plenty of experience with the kinds of formatting issues that could disrupt a transition and were able to successfully migrate the community’s lessons relatively quickly. Nevertheless, we’re grateful to be able to move on to the next project!

What difference does this make?

Consistency of infrastructure used across all of the lesson repositories in our ecosystem has many advantages. It gives us greater confidence that we can help lesson developers with troubleshooting, ensures that all lessons benefit from the increased accessibility provided by the Workbench, and further simplifies the process of providing future infrastructure updates.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this process a success, to the developers and Maintainers of the styles infrastructure that this community built so many fantastic lessons with over the years, and to the developers and contributors to the Workbench who are carrying this work into the future!