[OpendTect_Developers] What is the actual state of the project?

[Bert Bril]

Hi all,


Júlio said:


> I did ask about Makeself because is not so common and because sometimes
> the researcher/programmer just wants to check the source code of the
> project to get familiar. An "INSTALL_NOTES" text file is simple and
> inhibits an unwanted installation. Also, there are file permission
> problems.

Could you please explain both the above. We have HTML doc explaining a
lot and I have never encountered permission problems. And 99% of the
people make plugins.


> Anyway, you told about an installer, this certainly nullifies
> the discussion for the binaries in a user point of view :-). But for me
> and many other programmers, a *.tar.gz continues to be the better choice
> for the source code.

The installer will manage download and install of such packages, so
we'll be continuing to make such packages, and you'll always be able to
find them on ftp.

We'll switch to zip on all platforms BTW, but zip is available
cross-platform too so that cannot be a problem.


> No, i meant VCS (Version Control System). CVS is a particular VCS and,
> sadly, an anagram too :-). Today, most of the projects are migrating to
> distributed VCS's, like Git, Mercury, etc. Some famous are KDE, the
> recent LibreOffice created as a community manifestation to Oracle
> impositions under OpenOffice.org office suite. Both, KDE and
> LibreOffice, are now using Git instead of a centralized VCS (CVS,
> SVN,...). The main developers has total control of the project when the
> VCS is configured correctly. This is why disasters don't happens and
> Open Sources projects can grow.

The thing is that we would welcome the very first usable source
contribution from an external source. We are Open Source and in
principle people could contribute, but in practice we don't see anything
else than development of commercial plugins. The OpendTect base system
grows thanks to sponsors most notably dGB (delivering all the software)
and some other companies contributing money and usage/test. BG is by far
the most important sponsor (others include Statoil, ENI, Gaz de France,
Marathon, Addax, ...).

We're not the only OS tool in that position, see for example COIN. And
then, they are *much* more generally usable. But even for them the
problem is that they are not in the operating systems or generalized
tools. We make even much more specific stuff for a very specific target
group (geoscientists in interpretation).

For COIN, we contribute code every now and then, and they basically
integrate things after re-work to their own standards, if they integrate
at all. And I can understand that.


So my view is: let's first try whether not having Git or similar is a
real problem. If at some point this becomes a real issue, we can look
into it.


/Bert

-- 
-- Bert Bril / OpendTect developer at dGB
-- mailto:Bert.Bril at opendtect.org , http://opendtect.org