Thanks to Janos (“sothis” on the .org) we now have a GIT repository of the scenery tools, with public browsing of the scenery tools code.
(Non-programmers – this basically means that source code updates for the scenery tools will now be available every hour, rather than every now and then when I get around to it. The rest of this post is for programmers.)
The X-Plane tools code have always been open source, in that the LR-created code is distributed under the MIT/X11 license (which basically says “do whatever you want, don’t sue us”). The public repository makes the process of getting the code a lot simpler:
- The master code is actually in CVS, but this public GIT repository is updated from CVS once an hour, so this code is very close to the latest we have.
- The full version history, tags, and other information that might be useful to a programmer are all present.
- The web interface supports online browsing of the code, as well as downloading a “snapshot” of the entire tree (as a zip, gz, or bz2 file).
Git is, to put it mildly, a confusing tool if you don’t already use it. However, the web interface allows you to simply fetch the code from a given date. If you are a git user, git cloning is supported via http, and we are working on getting the git daemon running too. The repo is read-only; if you want to send us a patch, contact me.
(Git users will note that most of my checkin comments are really lame. This is a bad habit that comes from using CVS too much. CVS’s checkin comments are per-file, not per-group, which makes them somewhat useless to search on. Typically CVS users rely heavily on tags. The bridge from CVS to git tries to group them into a single commit, which helps reveal the actions taken on the source code.)
:o, i got mentioned in ben’s blog \o/
but seriously, for all the git users out there, i will prepare a wiki article on wiki.x-plane.com about the current development process very soon, since it differs quite a bit from the usual git workflow. the fact that the main repository remains managed by CVS restricts us to a specific subset what we can do with git and what not. details on the wiki then… 🙂
sothis — not so hard, you could have just paid me $15 and I would have posted your name. 😉
For the non-git users, yes, git is designed to make you feel stupid! 🙂
Seriously though, non-GIT users can still use GIT’s snapshot features to get the raw tree, and simply use Linux-style patching tools to send us updates.