ChucK community-building ideas: Continuous Integration, "canonical" chuck repo, etc

[nathanleiby]

Hi Spencer,

Hi, I'm Nate - programmer / music enthusiast. I had a few ideas for ChucK community, which now that you're on GitHub might be helpful. Mainly, I wanted to suggest these ideas because I've made private changes to ChucK, and maybe many others have done the same and would like to contribute their ideas for the language.

Please let me know your thoughts, and I'd be happy to get involved with this process. Thanks!

Cheers, Nate

p.s. I also just sent an email to the chuck-dev list regarding SublimeText syntax highlighting.

Continuous Builds

Have you considered using https://travis-ci.org/ to do continuous builds for ChucK? This would allow running your test suite on every commit, lots of hooks (e.g. sending build/test results to email/IRC), and simplifies receiving pull requests from others since tests are automatically run against them.

Canonical Repo

For community, GitHub is a great step forward from SVN. So many nice hooks, issues, pull-requests, visual diffs, etc.

Would be nice if there was a central repo for others to make pull requests on. See these people who have already mirror'd / fork'd ChucK:

• https://github.com/jimm/chuck/commits/master (with extra functions, e.g. file IO?)
• https://github.com/speps/chuck (with more support for windoze)
• https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-users/2011-April/006098.html

and people who have made fixes or prefer GH

• https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-dev/2012-September/000458.html
• https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-dev/2012-February/000427.html
• https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-users/2012-March/006626.html

Can we establish this (or another repo) as the main ChucK repo? Would you like to instead associate it with a Princeton/Stanford 'organization' on GitHub or keep it under your github account?

Port SVN history to Git

1. Port the history … git svn clone
2. Tag the versions, so people can revert to previous ones easily

   Package Management

   • OSX: tie into homebrew to allow people to easily download and compile from source (https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation; https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Formula-Cookbook). Moreover can easily add formulas to download different (older) versions, especially easy if they're tagged as such on GitHub.
   • Linux: apt-get

[spencersalazar]

Hey Nathan,

Thanks for the feedback-- you've touched on some issues that have definitely come up within the ChucK dev team.

Continuous Integration -- We are currently using a Jenkins cluster for CI, generously provided to us by Smule, a private software company we have ties to. Travis looks pretty interesting though, so that might be a good way to go moving forward.

GitHub -- We eagerly anticipate moving from our self-hosted SVN repo to GitHub. Based on some discussions on the mailing list a while back, this is basically a matter of when, not if.

SVN History -> git -- Cool, pretty sure I got all of the SVN history in this Git repo. Once we officially move to git I will probably redo it, relocate the canonical repo to CCRMA's Github account, and maybe get the tags too, though http://chuck.stanford.edu/release/files/ is probably a more reliable source of older releases.

* Package Management * -- A dude at CCRMA has set up a homebrew package which seems to be legit. I'd like to see macports and apt-get packages too, but I haven't had time to figure out how to contribute to those repositories -- if this is something you are familiar with/would be interested in working on, that would be a great help!

spencer