New day: Wednesday, 3pm-4:30. This time, developers only: Marlon, Vu, Ray, Tamir, Dawn, Daniel. (Jack hasn't started yet).

Subversion Discussion

• Daniel gave overview of svn options, with assistance from Marlon.
• Marlon is also experimenting with mercurial. It shouldn't affect the other devs using svn, because mercurial has cross-conversion features for svn. Marlon can work on both svn and mercurial.
• svn server? will be ofis.uwaterloo.ca.
  • Asking ray to upgrade to 1.6.
• access: apache, svnserve, or ssh? the book recommends svnserve for simple apps, though we aren't happy about plaintext passwords.
  • Marlon currently uses file:// via samba from the server. That would probably work OK.
    • Daniel will look into any warnings about this, but we'll assume we're using file:// against the server.
• discussed http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/doc/user/svn-best-practices.html
  • committing logical changesets: commits reflect a single purpose
  • descriptive log messages, incl. merges
  • branches: when needed. check out trunk changes into the branches, when possible.
• Daniel will do a demo of merging soon (for some value of soon).

Reports Discussion

• Tamir had questions. Described current status of his work on CS annual-report.
  • Q: can he run code against ofis server remotely? A: no, it's firewalled.
    • If it's useful Daniel will instruct him about port-forwarding over ssh... ssh -L 3306:ofis.uwaterloo.ca:3306 drallen@ofis.uwaterloo.ca
  • Q: Read-only access to db? A: yes; shared.
  • Q: considerations for programming...
    • much discussion on DB interface. Tamir asked about PDO versus homebrew procedural DB library. Marlon prefers procedural versus OO: faster? less messy?... but is open to being convinced with good reasoning. He would very much prefer seeing code with the standard library OFIS uses. vu suggested running phpdoc on OFAS code to see docs for his homebrew OO-style DB interface.
    • Tamir: will write up the reports code with the OFIS library and re-implement with PDO, and document/compare.
  • Makes sense we all check out the wiki's docs on coding style (eg., variable names) for next week. Probably out-of-date since wiki docs are seldom updated.
    • http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/bin/view/OFIS/ProgrammerCodingStyle (and explanation of database coding style: http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/bin/view/OFIS/DatabaseCodingStyle)
  • Q from Vu: What sort of report-like objects are CS working on?
    • annual report; research-book output; possibly webpages.
    • NSERC reports would be great, though it's been a challenge to OFIS for a while.
    • Daniel: CS will need to have prof-level discussions about reports we need.
  • Q from Daniel: Who will be responsible for setting up our svn? A: Marlon and Ray, says Marlon.
• Vu says bibtex has one challenge: there is no built-in datatype telling what sort of record is being added. Might need to build a parser.
• Marlon recommended xampp packaged LAMP, though he hasn't used it.
  • in the meantime, Tamir has lighthttpd/php/mod_ssl installed and running, without a self-signed certificate
    • Dawn offered to help with the self-signing instructions.

Completed Tasks

• Daniel: set up meeting with Marlon, Vu, Ray about svn.

Upcoming Tasks

• Tamir: Reports coding
• Tamir/Dawn: self-signed certificate
• Daniel: look into svn via file://
• Daniel: continue learning about svn branches and merging, to give a demo.
• Daniel: get information from current OFIS users
• Daniel: make some sort of comment to the group about reporting code and whether it's reasonable to take on the task of OFIS report modifications (as part of output development).

-- DanielAllen - 03 Sep 2009