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Colaboration Tools – SVN The other night I was listening on Teamspeak as Bill – KD5TFD and
Tony - were discussing oscillator and receiver performance of the
SoftRock40 V5. Bill had posted a link to about 40 scope traces on his website
that were the focus of the discussion. I had no part in it, but felt that I was
privileged to be hearing and viewing a live magazine article in QEX. Since
it’s inception about 1.5 years ago this type of conversation has occurred
many times over on many different projects. Although I provided Teamspeak so
Gerald, and sdr-1000 owners might just have a discussion forum for presenting
ideas and updates, it has been used far more
as a collaboration tool. Had it not been for Teamspeak, the SoftRock40, UCB and
many other offshoots, currently including the FPGA, collaboration might not
have happened at all. If they did happen they would have evolved, MUCH more
slowly. Teamspeak happened to be the right groupware tool at the right time. My point here is a tool very effectively being used for a needed
purpose – springboard rapid active collaboration and project delivery. The fpga offshoot interest group known as Xylo came together almost
overnight with Dale WA8SRA and Don – AE5K providing almost instant and
abundant resources for the group. One resource Dale provided was an SVN server.
SVN and CVS are client/server collaborative document versioning tools. We have
all heard them mentioned before, but I suspect few are using them or understand
how they work. Some of the FPGA folks put some files up on the server but no
one has jumped on the value of the usage. I think part of the reason is
that everyone thinks there is a huge learning curve to overcome. That they are
very complex and not worth the effort to learn. This past week I decided to
look into it a little further and have been PM ing Dale to get some idea how
they work. Frankly I found it to be much easier than I imagined, and to my way
of thinking almost a necessity to accelerate programming projects.
Actually any project where more than one person is working on a document or
group of related documents (like a User Manual?). It even is helpful for ONE
person to use it in a local project! It is easier than Teamspeak to install and begin using. The learning
curve is not that bad, if this dummy (me) can do a couple of hours of reading
and experimenting and use it effectively. The SDR-1000 open source development path to date has been one of
individuals working on the released source code, making modifications,
e-mailing the modifications to Eric1. Eric1 evaluates the snippit of code
or whole project and includes changes in the next beta release or does not use
it. This is not bad, and it accomplishes the purpose of always having a stable
release version and a beta which is offered back to the users from FlexRadio.
It HAS worked very well and we DO have a stable, documented release. It
is also a very dangerous method since it really IS NOT VERSIONED. The result of
which has happened to Bob – N4HY a number of times working with Eric1. He
e-mails a big file with his improvements only to find out that the file he sent
is an old one with bugs in it, that he has already corrected once in a later
revision of the file. NOT GOOD! The adage is that AOL AIM is not a versioning
tool. Occasionally users like Bill – KD5TFD make modified versions of
their project on their websites. Bill’s code is good until the next Beta
version is released, and then Bill’s version is no longer the current
version with his mods. We as users download Bill’s code and like the
mods, then we lose them to the next beta release, unless Bill does extra effort
to include his mods in the new release. John – K2OX is the most recent of the fantastic contributing
programming folks doing this. We may or may not see the audio recording mods he
has made to the code which sound VERY interesting and some of us would like to
play with it. John also mentioned another development he is working on. A
standard user specific include file which can be compiled into the latest release
from Flex Radio. That WOULD be very nice and approximates a ‘user modal
approach’. All of these efforts lack two important things, collaboration and some method of versioning. The same thing is happening to
contributors in the FPGA group! There is NO reason that open source
contributors to PowerSDR source can’t have a ‘branch’ as it
is called in SVN. Eric1 has just as much access as anyone else and can
incorporate anything he wants into the FlexRadio official supported versions. Enter Dale – WA8SRA and Tortise SVN on the client side. Dale and
I have been collaborating for a while on this and have an assignment for you.
Also Dale will be around this Friday night on the Teamspeak Forum to answer
questions, he also has put together a “Getting Started Guide”.
However, in just one message to me, after I had installed Tortoise he had given
me a 5 line ‘how to’ and it worked! I am running a contest on the FPGA reflector to name the project_name/group_name.
Everyone is welcome. There is a doc file in SVN which will be the
‘official’ submissions file for the contest ending this Sunday
night (US). The prize is a slightly used ATX power supply shipped to the winner
by me. I am the contest dictator. All that is required is that you download and
install Tortise SVN program in Linux or Windows. In Windows Tortise installs
itself as an explorer shell and points to a directory where you have created a
copy of the current server side version. It has neat little green checkmarks on
all files which are in sync with the current server files. If you open the
local directory and do an update and see a red exclamation point you do not
have the current version. More later. Here is where you get Tortoise SVN: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ Here is where you enter the SVN – FPGA contest. Just add your
entries into the groupnames.doc file and commit the changes. Paste this link into the URL box in the the repo browser presents. If
it is your first time put the file into the directory you create. svn://svn.hamsdr.com/svn/repos/test/trunk If you have problems or questions read the help file first. If you have
further questions be around on the FRF forum Friday night. If you have
suggestions of how we can use this tool a group collaborating on either
PowerSDR or FPGA project, be there Friday night. If you have ANY INTEREST IN
PROGRAMMING in either group be there Friday night. C U on Teamspeak! Thanks Eric2 – AA4SW |