Scott Morrow wrote:
> I’m always interested in how a multi-person LiveCode team would
> operate.
The largest team I ever managed was using Sybase Gain Momentum, and
excellent xTalk from yesteryear which has since changed hands so many
times I don't know who owns it today.
The team had about two dozen people modifying stack files: for
programmers writing production tools, and the rest of the staff would
use those point-and-click tools to build courseware.
Gain had a stack-level check-in/check-out system that was a very good
fit for most of the work I did then and since.
There are a few ad hoc solutions of that sort members of this community
have build for various projects, and Chipp Walters once released a tool
called Magic Carpet as a more generalized solution. I've been told that
Magic Carpet was re-released as open source a few years ago, but I can't
find it this morning (the old altuit.com site doesn't seem reachable
from here).
In more recent years the focus has shifted to a more granular approach
that allows line-by-line comparison and merging, most popularly done via
GitHub.
Designed for traditional languages in which an app is comprised of
hundreds of tiny text files, GitHub has been a challenging solution to
attempt to use with LiveCode's binary stack files.
The LiveCode team implemented text-file stacks that can be used as
libraries a few versions ago, so now at least those can be used with
GitHub seamlessly.
They're also working on other methods of altering the file format for
better integration with GitHub, but I don't think any of that will land
in a release version until at least v8.1.
In the meantime, most of the projects I work on have between three and
five developers, and we generally favor factoring the architecture into
separate logically-organized stack files anyway, so it's a small matter
to assign owners for each of those across the team according to the team
member's strengths and interests.
This can work well with small teams (it kept the MetaCard IDE project
alive for many years, to this date the longest-running open source
project in our community), but in today's open source world we need to
support an unknowable number of contributors so I've been experimenting
with versioning and merging tools that work directly on the binary stack
files. Hopefully I'll get more time between client projects later this
year so I can bring those to completion and share them as open source
themselves, so they're not only useful to others but also become a test
bed for the very workflows they aim to support.
> Actually, I’m even more interested in how other individuals
> operate. Most of us work without being able to observe the workflow
> of our peers (Hence the recent string of posts on "Best way to check
> if a Field is a label?”) Which is really a sort of best practice
> conversation.
Yes, this is a great community that way. I'm always picking up new
tricks here.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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