Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ralph Lange <[email protected]> · Thu, 06 May 2010 09:21:12 -0400

On Wed 05 May 2010 17:02:17 Benjamin Franksen wrote:

On Mittwoch, 5. Mai 2010, Andrew Johnson wrote:

I'm glad to see someone take on (re)development of the sequencer.

I am ready to take over maintenance (and, hopefully, further improvements)

from now on if this is generally desired.

That's a deal - great!!

I was also getting concerned about the Sequencer's future, so I'm really

happy to hear that.

I can give you an account for write

access to our svn and Trac, but I'd be willing to transfer the ownership

and point everything to your site if you'd prefer that

I would definitely prefer that. I could be persuaded to switch to another

distributed VCS like Bazaar or Mercurial (or even Git), but would rather

not have to work with Subversion. I hope you understand ;-)

Lewis Muir suggested public hosting at Launchpad, like EPICS base. He has a

point. (This would mean Bazaar. Not my preferred choice, but as I said I

could be convinced if this makes it noticeably easier for others to

contribute.)

I would think SourceForge is the more appropriate place.

* With the exception of base, all other publicly hosted EPICS related

projects are on SourceForge (I counted 16 this morning), including major

players like Control-System-Studio, EPICS V4 (PVData, PVAccess), IRMIS,

VDCT, EPICS/QT,.... (If the APS legal department would allow their

employees to open SF accounts, EPICS Base would be hosted there, too.) I

think it would need a strong objective reason not to keep stuff at one

place.

* Their services are complete: a variety of VCS (from their selection I

would suggest Mercurial) , repository browsers, file download area,

project web space, Trac and other webapps, mailing lists, news boards,

forums,...

* Experience with managing a SF project (aka help) is more widely

available within the EPICS community.

In any case, I am willing to convert the svn repo and rebase (actually

re-record) the changes I made. So we will have the complete history in one

repo.

Apropos: Some of the source files still contain changelog style header

comments and an ancient LANL copyright notice. I would like to get rid of

both: the changelog clutters the source code with information that is

completely out-dated, irrelevant when trying to understand the code, and

you can always look up who made what changes in the VCS. It also gives

false positives when grep'ing for program phrases. Copyright stuff should

rather go to a separate LICENSE file. However, I hesitate to delete any of

this stuff out of respect for the original authors and also due to concerns

about legal issues.

Do you have a recommendation?

You have to be careful with copyright issues.

I would say - from what I read elsewhere:

Removing copyright notices is probably illegal as long as there is

content that was published under that copyright. Check the current

copyright notices in Base - I would say if you don't drop one, you can

replace them with that current text.

Don't forget to add the copyright of Helmholtz-Zentrum in the files that

you changed. (We are allowed to create PD work, but the HZB still owns

the copyright for everything we do within work hours.)

The copyright notices have to be in the source files, else they might

not be legally valid. (Also, they have to contain the word "copyright",

the copyright symbol or "(c)" are not enough.)

You can ship the license in a separate file, in that case every source

file has to state that the license in that file applies.

Check that the VCS contains reasonable comments, then drop the changelog

style comments in the files.

(but I would ask

if you could add a history browser so it's possible to browse the

repository changes without having to install darcs).

This should be possible (in the near future), as we are in the process of

replacing the ancient machine that serves our software distribution pages.

We have not yet finally decided how exactly the old content gets

re-organized but I'll make sure we have some project publishing / bug

tracker thing there, something like Trac or (my preference) Redmine. Both

enable history browsing (and more) for a number of VCSes. Give us a few

weeks.

I would strongly suggest to move it onto an external public hosting

service - and get rid of the system administration overhead of

maintaining and securing such a bunch of (public!) services, which is

usually no fun, just a lot of work and pain.

Cheers,
Ralph

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System