Development

This page contain detailed information about the development model, how to get the source code, how to contribute and other stuff that's nice to know as a developer.

Subversion repository

OpenInput uses Subversion (or svn for short) as source code version control system. You can download svn for almost any operating system -- just follow the above link for a list of graphical and text based clients. This page assumes that you're using the command line client.

To download the latest version of OpenInput using svn, issue the command

svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/openinput/trunk openinput

which uses the specialised SVN protocol, or

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/openinput/trunk openinput

to use HTTP instead. If you have a login to the gna.org server you should be able to use SSH aswell. Simply replace svn:// with ssh:// in the above command. Team members must use SSH as write access is only allowed on this protocol.

You can also browse the code online or download the daily snapshot of the trunk branch (the main development branch).

The development model

We try to follow the traditional Free/Open Source development model with all it's up and downsides. If you want a particular feature or support for a special device/system either implement it yourself and mail is the patch or ask (kindly) on the mailinglists for the particular feature. If the development team does not receive requests, patches or bugreports, we'll quietly just go about our buisness and implement features, fix bugs etc. as we see fit.

If you have trouble using OpenInput or have suggestions, requests, found a bug or otherwise, please use the appropiate mailing list.

Until the first stable OpenInput version (1.0.0) is released, we reserve the right to break the API/ABI at any time. Once we hit version 1.0.0, we will most likely begin using the traditional UNIX versioning number scheme.

Roadmap

We have several ideas of what to implement for OpenInput both with regards to support for more devices/systems and with regards to better, cleaner design. As OpenInput is primarily developed by hackers in their spare time, we will refrain from using using dates or deadlines. The roadmap looks like this:

Reporting bugs and submitting patches

If you think you've found a bug but don't want to (or don't know how to) fix it, send an email describing the problem to the user (and/or devel) mailinglist, and we'll take it from there.

If you know how to code i C, it's very easy to generate a patch using SVN. Simply type

svn diff > oi.patch

in the shell, and the oi.patch file will contain the diff, which describes your changes to the code. Mail this file to the devel mailinglist, and we'll take a look at it.

Joining the development team

Before you even consider joining, you will have to have proven that you know what you're doing (programming) and that you can be trusted. One way to do this is to send high-quality patches to the devel mailinglist. If and when you think you deserve commit-priviledges to the SVN repository, send an email to Jakob.

Links

Here's a small collection if links that point to other OpenInput resources on the net.

This document was last modified Sunday November 29, 2009.