[seek-dev]SEEK CVS organization

[Matt Jones]

Seek'ers,

The connection information for the SEEK CVS repository is described in a 
web page at http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/HOWTO-cvs-over-ssh.html.  To 
connect, you'll need an account, which I can create.  To write, you also 
need to be authorized to have write permission for a particular part of 
the tree.

At the current time I am the only one with write access to the SEEK CVS, 
and the only thing in there is the SEEK website.  This will obviously 
need to change as people begin to work on SEEK.  For now, if you have a 
desire to have a CVS account, just email me and I'll set it up 
immediately.  In the mean time, I can figure out a way to set them all 
up more comprehensively for everyone on the SEEK project.

We'll also need some sort of hierarchy to keep things organized.  Here's 
a proposal for a directory structure within the CVS module.  It can 
always be expanded/changed later, but some initial thought about it will 
probably help keep it organized.  Alternatives, additions, and comments 
appreciated...

seek
  |--- outreach
  |    |--- presentations
  |    |--- publications
  |    |--- website
  |
  |--- software
       |
       |--- project1
       |    |---- README
       |    |---- LICENSE
       |    |---- bin
       |    |---- docs
       |    |---- lib
       |    |---- src
       |    |---- test
       |
       |--- project2
       |--- projectn

We've found it pretty useful to put all of our presentation slides and 
papers in one central location for our other projects.  That allows 
others to utilize the slides and makes it easier to compile annual 
reports.  CVS may not be the best place because CVS doesn't handle 
binary files so well and some of our Co-PIs may be less inclined to set 
up a cvs client, so alternatives are possible (like WebDAV?).  I've 
experimented with it a bit and it seems to be pretty seamless in terms 
of its integration with Windows and MacOS.  So if we did that, then we 
would nix the "outreach" directory above in favor of putting those 
things on the DAV server.  The only downside is that the versioning part 
of DAV seems less mature than the other parts, possibly non-existent 
depending on the software we choose. Thoughts on that?

The directory structure that we've used on all of our current projects 
for the KNB is shown for project1, but I think we should allow some 
flexibility within the projects for different organizational schemes.

In terms of write access, I think for now it should be simple -- either 
people have write access or not.  This makes people responsible for not 
messing up things that others are working on, and for communicating 
about who is working in certain areas.  I think very fine-grained access 
control just gets in the way of productivity, so prefer this simpler 
approach.  We need to be talking about this stuff a lot anyways. Thoughts?

Matt

-- 
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Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439   Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)

Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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