[Fedora-electronic-lab-list] Your views on "trac on a Livecd " ?

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

Hello there,

My intension is to enhance project management (with respect to
electronics) experience while designing hardware with FEL.

So on the FEL Livedvd which is a marketing medium, I wish to give
users an _example_ about how they can use trac and git/svn for
hardware development and track the open tickets. Thereby in the quest
of improving the hardware design methodologies on FEL, and  expanding
our marketing portfolio, I wish to hear from you how I can implement
such trac/git/svn session on the LiveDVD if I provide some contents
(examples) ?

Kind regards,
Chitlesh

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

--- On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Chitlesh GOORAH
<chitlesh.goorah(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
| I wish to hear from you how I can implement
| such trac/git/svn session on the LiveDVD if I provide some contents
| (examples) ?
\--

There is a video session and presentation on git tutorial by Bart
Trojanowski which is really good. You can ask him if it can be shipped
with the DVD? He gave me permission to re-use his presentation under
CC with attribution:

http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/

SK

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Shakthi Kannan wrote:
>  There is a video session and presentation on git tutorial by Bart
>  Trojanowski which is really good. You can ask him if it can be shipped
>  with the DVD? He gave me permission to re-use his presentation under
>  CC with attribution:
>
>  http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/ 
Hello Shakthi,

I think you got me wrong here. I was not really thinking about
- how to use git/trac/svn as individual software
but rather
how a combination of all these 3 could be used by CAD engineers to
automate their internal home based methodologies through a ticketing
service.

As you can see, it would rather be giving people the chance to enhance
their existing design methodologies or platform for hardware
development.

Example:
- A university can try (as in trial) this ticketing service + version
control and decide to expand their course to a long distance teaching
method.
- 2/3 people scattered around the world but have the same idea, they
will be introduced with FEL of such mechanism which allows them to
collaborate irrespective of their timezone.

To sum up, these are ways to improve hardware development with opensource tools.

Kind regards,
Chitlesh

[Svilen]

Hi Chitlesh,

The idea of course is quite nice, but there are some specifics. 
Concerning bug/task tracking - there should not be principle troubles 
here. In other words trac can be used in a trivial way as far as I can see.

Concerning the revision control systems ...
They are very good with text data. The trouble is that most of the FEL 
tools deal primarily with binary data (or I'm wrong?). All revision 
control systems I've seen are more or less helpless with binary data. 
What I mean is that the incremental diffs are practically unusable 
there. In the best case the revision control systems allow an external 
diff to be used for the corresponding file type. Correct me if I'm 
wrong, but neither of FEL tools offer a tool suitable to be used as an 
external diff for the binary formats they are dealing with. By the way - 
the situation is very similar with commercial tools. In result - all 
binary data used by FEL tools can't be stored incrementally in the 
databases of any of the revision control systems.
Don't get me wrong - this is not a problem of the revision control 
systems. They will deal with our binary data in the best way they can 
and it is - to store every single commit as a whole file. Now going in 
the layout land for example - it will result in a huge database. Not the 
most elegant solution.

It seems that if svn/git are to be used in an example methodology - then 
the example should be focused on a tools that use text files (well 
suitable for incremental diffs ) to store their data. If the focus is on 
trac only - then I can't see a problem.

Actually this is quite interesting and uncharted area for layout 
formats. The revision control is practically unknown there. I would be 
quite keen to discuss this separately if there is an interest.

Regards
Svilen

Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
>  On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Shakthi Kannan wrote:
>    
> > There is a video session and presentation on git tutorial by Bart
> > Trojanowski which is really good. You can ask him if it can be shipped
> > with the DVD? He gave me permission to re-use his presentation under
> > CC with attribution:
> >
> > http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/
> >     
>
>  Hello Shakthi,
>
>  I think you got me wrong here. I was not really thinking about
>  - how to use git/trac/svn as individual software
>  but rather
>  how a combination of all these 3 could be used by CAD engineers to
>  automate their internal home based methodologies through a ticketing
>  service.
>
>  As you can see, it would rather be giving people the chance to enhance
>  their existing design methodologies or platform for hardware
>  development.
>
>  Example:
>  - A university can try (as in trial) this ticketing service + version
>  control and decide to expand their course to a long distance teaching
>  method.
>  - 2/3 people scattered around the world but have the same idea, they
>  will be introduced with FEL of such mechanism which allows them to
>  collaborate irrespective of their timezone.
>
>  To sum up, these are ways to improve hardware development with opensource tools.
>
>  Kind regards,
>  Chitlesh
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  Fedora-electronic-lab-list mailing list
>  Fedora-electronic-lab-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list
>

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Svilen wrote:
>  Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither of FEL tools
>  offer a tool suitable to be used as an external diff for the binary formats
>  they are dealing with. By the way - the situation is very similar with
>  commercial tools. In result - all binary data used by FEL tools can't be
>  stored incrementally in the databases of any of the revision control
>  systems 
Hello Svilen,

You are partially right here. However for digital design, a revision
control for vhdl and verilog is useful, especially if there are many
designers. With the perl modules for vhdl and verilog being included
for F11, digital designers can expand their home made design flow by
using those modules in their own perl scripts. Some perl modules could
even be used for co-simulation or co-verification purposes as well.
Example, memory based verilog designs

powercraft.nl already use svn for geda and pcb based projects :

http://www.powercraft.nl/websvn/listing.php?repname=OpenARM+Single-board+...

This is my reason behind this trac/git/svn discussion. Unfortunately
this does not apply to each FEL apps.

regards,
chitlesh

[Svilen]

Of course there is no troubles with Veriog/VHDL etc. code and revision 
control and tracking must be used there. No doubt about that. Do you 
think though it should be any different from the "usual" open source flow?

Regards
Svilen

Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
>  On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Svilen wrote:
>    
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither of FEL tools
> > offer a tool suitable to be used as an external diff for the binary formats
> > they are dealing with. By the way - the situation is very similar with
> > commercial tools. In result - all binary data used by FEL tools can't be
> > stored incrementally in the databases of any of the revision control
> > systems
> >     
>
>  Hello Svilen,
>
>  You are partially right here. However for digital design, a revision
>  control for vhdl and verilog is useful, especially if there are many
>  designers. With the perl modules for vhdl and verilog being included
>  for F11, digital designers can expand their home made design flow by
>  using those modules in their own perl scripts. Some perl modules could
>  even be used for co-simulation or co-verification purposes as well.
>  Example, memory based verilog designs
>
>  powercraft.nl already use svn for geda and pcb based projects :
>
>
> http://www.powercraft.nl/websvn/listing.php?repname=OpenARM+Single-board+...
>
>  This is my reason behind this trac/git/svn discussion. Unfortunately
>  this does not apply to each FEL apps.
>
>  regards,
>  chitlesh
>

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Svilen  wrote:
>  Do you think
>  though it should be any different from the "usual" open source flow? 
Well it depends on the user's project needs.

Chitlesh

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

Hello there,

We are entering the cold world of Freeze very soon. It seems that it
is too late to do such thing with the Livedvd as well in accordance to
the SPIN SIG wiki pages, I should not modify any files from any RPM
package.

Another possibility is to use our
http://hosted.fedoraproject.org/fedora-electronic-lab as an example.

What do you think ? Yes, it is true those who don't have internet will
miss this example.

Chitlesh