[Aimmath-developers] reply to message from Ken

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

Dear Ken,

thanks for your message. Let me reply to it piece by piece and am forwarding
the reply to the aim-developer list because you ask questions of interest to
all AiM developers.

> As you can see, I've never worked on a group coding project before, so
> please forgive my complete ignorance on these matters.  Any help or advice
> you can provide will appreciated.

This applies to almost all of us. I think that Greg is the only one of us
who has worked on a team project (GAP) before. So we are trying to figure
things out together. We should try to find what works best for us.

>  There are so many web sites and email lists
> now that I'm not really sure how things are organized anymore.

That is my fault for not explaining the motivation behind the new AiM
homepage.

We are now following the example of most open source projects hosted on
SourceForge: we have an official homepage at aimmath.sourceforge.net for the
general public and we have a more technical project page at
sourceforge.net/projects/aimmath. The second one is mostly for developers.

There are therefore now also two places to post messages. For the general
public and AiM users it is simple. They will always post to the forums on
aimmath.sourceforge.net. For us developers it is a bit more complicated. We
would generally post to the forums at aimmath.sourceforge.net. In particular
announcements about developments plans on which we would like public input
should be posted to the forum "Future AiM".

Anything of relevance ONLY to us developers (like how to work with CVS) and
anything that we want to keep among ourselves should be posted to the
aim-developers mailing list hosted at sourceforge.net/projects/aimmath.

Finally there is the old JISC mailing list. This will currently reach some
more people than the aimmath site. So any major announcement (of new
releases for example) should probably be cross posted to that list.

>Plus I'm
> still trying to figure out CVS. I will probably be writing to you
> with some
> questions soon.

We really need some good documentation. For the moment there are the big CVS
manuals at http://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.11.6/cvs.html and
http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html.


> However, I probably should post somewhere to a discussion list what we are
> planning.  So here is another question for you... where is the appropriate
> place to post such a message about current work?  There is Sangwin's
> original list, some developer lists on sourceforge, some forums on your
> moodle aim site, etc, and I'm not really sure what is best?

What you describe is very interesting. I don't see any reason to keep the
information private. So please post this info to the "Future AiM" forum at
aimmath.sourceforge.net.


> In addition, I
> assume that if we are working on the servlet, we ought to somehow
> check-out
> those source files from the CVS or mark them in some way to say we are
> working on them?

CVS has this feature allowing you to notify other CVS users that you are
editing a file. See
http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Watches__CVS_As_Telephone_. However
with just 8 of us it is probably easiest to just post messages to the
aim-developers list about what you are currently working on.


> But this will be a major rewrite, so it isn't
> like we are
> modifying those files but rather replacing them.  What is the right way to
> signify this to the other developers in the SourceForge/CVS environment??

Again: simply send a message to the aim-developers list.

And please break you postings into small bits, each containing only one
question or one topic, with a suitable subject line for each one. That makes
it easier for everyone to find the message again later. This message for
example has the subject line "committing server mods". But it also has other
interesting questions about which forum to post to, and how to use CVS.
These questions and the replies to them would get lost easily.

I am looking forward to the post describing you work on the server.

Best wishes,

Gustav