Version Control – I am very confused now

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  • January 24, 2014 at 8:56 am #5233
    cmcgrath5035
    Moderator

    I have been following the forum for a while now, my last significant hands on activity was back in October, documented here

    In a recent response (to tomking), Alden wrote
    “Lastly, there’s a question of if you are having problems because of something in your host program. tgFX Master works with TinyG Master. If you are using tgFX you should be using the 32 bit version with master (We removed the x64 windows version that you and other were having issues with). tgFX(32bit) should work just fine with master. ”

    Looking back to October 2013 to refresh myself (my link above), I confirmed that my work was done with the TGFX Windows 32 bit version v.96 EDGE build 2404. If I recall correctly, that was the only version of tgFX that worked at all; it worked OK, with several documented bugs.

    So I went searching for the tgFX Master that Alden refers to above. When I look in GitHub – tgFX, I see no binaries (meaning .exe files). Perhaps I don’t know where to look.
    If I look at Dropbox,

    I see the v 0.96 build 2404 that was posted 3 months ago and also tgfx_windows-x32 v.95 – build 2072.exe posted 9 days ago. Is that the Master you refer to Alden? Older version number, older build number yet 3 months newer “Modified” date.
    I hope you can understand my confusion.

    Some general comments/observations for you to mull
    1. I get dizzy circulating between GitHub, DropBox, Wiki and Forum. Keeping all of those in-sync and consistent has got to be eating up our most valuable resource – Alden and Riley’s time. Can you pick one distribution model, for example GitHub?
    2. At this stage where release version, build version and the like are UBER important, I suggest you deprecate the use of Master, EDGE , etc terminology and speak only in terms of version, or version and build if you must. Hopefully folks posting will get the hint and report what versions (or versions and builds) they are working with or having trouble with.
    3. As I hinted at in a post about a month ago, I personally find this WordPress Forum tool to be seriously lacking. Can you at least turn on the “prevue” capability so we can make these conversations more useful and readable?

    Cheers

    • This topic was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by cmcgrath5035.
    January 24, 2014 at 10:22 am #5235
    alden
    Member

    Good suggestions. Let me think this over and talk with Riley. I agree, we need to find a cleaner way to make things available.

    Some of the challenges are that github does not easily deal with binaries or hex files, it’s designed for sources and they structure it so it’s difficult to manage anything else. So already we need 2 mechanisms.

    The wiki is needed as it’s the documentation.

    Another is that the terms Master and Edge are, in fact, meaningful in themselves. We will THINK we have all the issues addressed when we push to master, then find that there are 1 or 2 bugs that need to be fixed in master – e.g. the promotion from 380.06 to 380.08, both of which are in master. We also do need to isolate the Edge builds from master so we can iterate them without affecting the master. What we probably should do is ALWAYS state the build number, whether it’s in master or edge (or sometimes dev).

    As for the Forum, I have to ask Riley – he manages that part. We could possibly move the forum from here to the Github Issues, but that’s not really it’s intended use – although a lot of projects use it as a forum and it seems to work OK.

    Let me talk this over with the team and see what we can come up with.

    January 24, 2014 at 12:26 pm #5237
    tomking505
    Member

    Amen, brother. Well said.

    The versioning is confusing. Particularly which TGfx works with which firmware.

    All the different venues are confusing.

    This forum is clunky. Why limit editing to 5 minutes?

    And I’m not too crazy about GitHub. The repeated messages necessary to explain exactly how to download a hex file should be unneccesary. Maybe zip the file so it arrives intact?

    • This reply was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by tomking505.
    January 24, 2014 at 3:20 pm #5240
    cmcgrath5035
    Moderator

    Alden, just to be clear, while I have personal issues with the WordPress tool, I think trying to use GitHub Issues as a Forum would be a bad idea – It seems suitable for code development level communication(e.g. bug reports and tracking), but not Forum, IMHO. There are much better Forum tools out there, but you guys only have so many cycles. I understand that there might be a prevue add-in, cannot say for sure how it gets implemented(I got that from searching the WordPress site). That would help a lot; again, my opinion.

    And don’t get me wrong – I realize that at any stage of maturity of a family of products, there will be Master, EDGE and down right raw development going on. What I really meant to emphasize was that today Master is something, but tomorrow may be something else as new code flows. I think we would all be better served to focus on version (or version plus build) or perhaps a major release/minor release/ special identifier, or “version X.Y.Z”.

    I agree with your comments on GitHub as a binary distribution tool as well; you may recall that I was one of many who tried to load an ASCII of tinyg.hex into my tinyG. GitHub is good because it can be well structured, but there is a learning curve for everyone. A well maintained Dropbox could work well in my opinion, what I am really suggesting is one place to go, GitHub OR DropBox (or some other managed folder where code and HotTips can easily be posted and maintained). Whatever you choose, it should be easy to embed a URL for a specific file in a Forum comment or suggestion.

    And, can you please clairfy my question as to what tgfx_windows-x32 v.95 – build 2072.exe that is in Dropbox is? Is it the latest and greatest tgFX?

    Thanks.

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