On 2015-08-12 22:52, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Now that we're talking about a much broader scope, and especially
given the central role of VCS in fostering healthy open source work,
my opinion is now more open than before, and somewhat undecided.
If it turns out that we've had a great open source option the whole
time and just never realized it, the situation is somewhat mitigated.
I don't know if lcVCS is available under GPL-compatible license, and
if so that would seem a good option. But then again, if it's a good
option why would LiveCode Ltd undertake the non-trivial expense of
writing a completely different tool?
These are open questions, for which I currently have no answer.
## Current state of version control for stacks
I spent the first few months after joining LiveCode attempting to
implement a scheme which would allow *any* LiveCode app -- no matter how
complicated -- to be stored in a format that could be reliably and
safely stored in a version control system and losslessly converted to
and from "traditional" LiveCode stacks.
It turned out to be impractical to do this any better than lcVCS does,
and lcVCS is already free software that any of our users can use, so my
project got shelved around Christmas 2014 [1]. If you want to see where
I got to, go and look at:
* https://github.com/peter-b/livecode/tree/feature-stackdir -- full spec
+ implementation for on-disk format
* https://github.com/peter-b/livecode/tree/feature-stackarr -- partial
implementation of stack (de)serialisation
It's entirely free software, and anyone can take the code and finish the
job.
## Business Application Framework != version control for stacks
In the meantime, one of our developers explored an alternative approach
to storing apps in version control. It becomes much easier when you
constrain users to write and design their programs in a **totally**
different way to traditional LiveCode apps. That's the Business
Application Framework. It's a completely new approach to LiveCode
version control, in that it doesn't even attempt to solve the problem of
applying version control to LiveCode stacks.
It is probably also worth mentioning that the Business Application
Framework is written entirely in LiveCode. It's built using features
that are available to everyone as free software in the community
edition. Specifically, those features are: text based file I/O, string
manipulation, and script-only stacks.
Peter
[1] Since then, I've been working on LiveCode Builder, HTML5, and
various quality assurance things (including a continuous integration bot
written in pure LCB -- no LiveCode engine needed!)
--
Dr Peter Brett <peter.br...@livecode.com>
LiveCode Engine Development Team
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