[wplug] open source software development methodology

[Tom Rhodes]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:50:18 +0100
"Alexandros Papadopoulos" <apapadop at alumni.cmu.edu> wrote:

> I assume there are a number of people on this list that have
> first-hand involvement in free software projects, so I'd appreciate
> your experiences, DO's and DONT's on the below scenario.
> 
> A loose team of software developers and web 2.0 architects has been
> working on creating a web application that could be called a portal, a
> wiki, a CMS, a knowledge management system and a social networking
> tool all at once. The base layer is mediawiki, with several add-ons
> and some glue between them. Development of this suite has been
> happening in a quite close circle of people up to now, and no real
> software development methods were put in place.
> 
> Now we're thinking of opening up the suite for everyone to use and
> extend. But we don't know how, from a practical standpoint. We want to
> make it as easy as possible for interested third parties to grab a
> copy of the code and run a local, independent version with minimum
> hassle, without relinquishing control of the production copy of the
> code and the stability of the main sites that sit on it (one of them
> being http://openmethodology.org).
> 
> People with no serious software development experience have come
> together and drafted something like this:
> 
> 1. There is the production server and the development server. Noone
> has direct access to the production server.
> 2. Developers have accounts on the development server, and access to
> some version control system that allows them to checkout and merge the
> latest changes in the code.
> 3. When a developer/contributor believes a change he/she submitted
> needs to go to the main branch (the next version of the production
> codebase), he/she notifies a team of approvers.
> 4. The approvers have access to scripts that allow the newly submitted
> code to be incorporated into the the main development site's suite.
> Thus the code is tested for deficiencies, if it breaks anything etc on
> the development copy of the web suite.
> 5. If anything breaks, the production copy of the codebase is copied
> back from the production server to the development server, thus
> undoing any changes.
> 6. If it looks good on the development server, another magic script is
> executed that copies over everything to the production server.
> 
> Now, I see a lot of holes in this, but please remember it has been
> drafted by people who know next to nothing about software development.
> 
> I'd appreciate your comments/thoughts on the above, and/or pointers to
> development documentation/procedures that you might have used and
> found reasonably effective.

I write install files, either a Makefile or a a shell script.
Regardless of what needs installed, I try to make it as easy
as possible.  At most people are creating a database and/or
installing third party software.


-- 
Tom Rhodes