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).

Joining the Project

Audacity is very helpful in getting new developers incorporated into the project's community. First off, the Audacity wiki has a New Developers Guide which includes topics such as:

• Tips for New Developers
• Platform Specific Developing Guides
• Design Topics
• Improving and Adding Features
• Bug Fixing

Audacity also has a Developer's mailing list that I immediately signed up for. The list is not only for Audacity developers but anyone else interested in following or contributing to Audacity's development. I already have been getting emails from the core development team talking about certain high priority bugs that need to be fixed in the current release.

FOSS Experiences and Reflections

For this blog post I was required to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Audio Version), which was written by Eric S. Raymond, a long time hacker who has been active in the Internet culture since the early 1970's. In this particular writing of Eric's, he talks about the two opposite types of software development styles: "The Cathedral" style, and "The Bazaar" style.

My FOSS Preferences

UPDATE: OUR TEAM HAS CHOSEN AUDACITY FOR OUR FOSS PROJECT

My teams first task is to find a FOSS project to work with. So we each set out to look for some potential candidates. Through surfing the web to look up information on open source projects, I came across a website called Ohloh.

Ohloh is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it...Ohloh is not a forge — it does not host projects and code. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and analytics and search services. By connecting to project source code repositories, analyzing both the code’s history and ongoing updates, and attributing those updates to specific contributors, Ohloh can provide reports about the composition and activity of project code bases, and aggregate this data to track the changing demographics of the FOSS world.                                                            About Ohloh 

Using it I searched for FOSS projects based on certain criteria such as: project activity, project popularity, and programming languages the project is written in. The following is a rundown of the three projects I looked at as possible choices for our team's project:

Square One

This is my first blog post so I guess I should introduce myself: My name is John Youngblood and I am a current student at the College of Charleston. My major is in Computer Science B.S. and I am also working towards minors in Physics and Math. My specific interests when it comes to the world of Technology are:

• Artificial Intelligence (with an emphasis on game logic)
• Music Editing and Creating Software
• Graphic Processing
• Physics Engines

That is a quick overview of my interest in terms of computers and should give you a sense of what strive to do with my degree once a graduate this Spring.