Subversion Under Control

Now its time to access the source code of Audacity! Like most FOSS, Audacity uses Source Control Management (a.k.a. Revision Control or Version Control) to manage and update changes in documents and source code for each of the projects developers. Changes are usually identified by the SCM with a number or letter code. For example, an initial set of files is "version 1". When the first change is made, the resulting set is "version 2", and so on. Each update is associated with timestamps and the person making the change. Changes in versions can be compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged. SCMs most commonly run as stand-alone applications, but version control can also be found embedded in word processors (i.e. Google Docs) and in content management systems (e.g. Wikipedia's Page History).


There are many varying SCM tools out there for software projects to use, with some of the most popular ones being:

• Subversion (svn)

 

• Concurrent Version System (cvs)

 

• Mercurial (hg)

  

 

• Git (git)

 

 

• Bazaar (bzr)

The SCM tool that the Audacity project uses is Subversion, which I have worked with before when I worked with the data mining FOSS project Weka. Audacity's wiki page gives great step by step instructions on how to checkout Audacity's source code from the svn repository and then compile/install it through the terminal of a Unix based operating system. I myself use a Linux operating called Ubuntu (ver. 12.04). The commands needed to be entered into the terminal are as follows:

1. sudo apt-get install subversion  (installs subversion)
2. svn checkout http://audacity.googlecode.com/svn/audacity-src/trunk/ audacity-read-only (checkout Audacity's source code)
3. sudo apt-get build-dep audacity
4. sudo apt-get install cmake
5. cd audacity-read-only (moves the user into the source code directory)
6. ./configure
7. make
8. sudo make install

Getting through these steps was easy and straight forward, and after a couple of minutes of compiling and installing, I had Audacity up and running!