MatthewBrett gave a brief presentation of the current state of software organization and sharing in the CBU and beyond:
- Code organized in directories; no versioning
- Code fragments on wiki and elsewhere can get out of date
- SPM updates somewhat fragile because modified CBU versions can be older than current SPM versions
- No ready means of sharing utilities and SPM version
- Difficult for people outside CBU to reconstruct CBU SPM system.
We discussed code versioning, and in particular subversion - see CbuLug:UsingRepositories
We need some organized way of maintaining our software, and being able to share both development and stable versions of our code with other users.
Suggestions were:
- Maintain CBU SPM distribution as own repository, including updates
- Use repository merge function to patch in SPM updates to CBU SPM distribution, thus picking up updates to CBU patched files
- Keep all CBU utilities in CBU utilities repository, even those in very poor state of repair. Use repository system to update utilities in organized way.
- Keep stable and development versions of both repositories, to maintain stability of system, and allow sharing of up to date code
- Reference subversion repository directly from wiki, email etc to allow users to fetch latest files from maintained code.
Here is a draft suggestion for software organization: CbuSoftwareProposal