Creating a Google Home: StrafeNShoot Repository

When working in a software development team where a group of people are working on the same project, version control becomes a key element in maintaining the most current, up-to-date distrubution of a software. Constant updates have to be taken in account so that a developer does not end up making a change that has already occured.

For this week in my Software Engineering class, we learned about Configuration Management(CM) and Version Control Systems(VCS). We were to use a specific type of VCS, namely Subversion(SVN). Since the version of SVN is dependant on your Operation System, I used TortoiseSVN on my Windows XP. In combination with the previous assigments that dealt with Ant and Build, which made distributions easy to package, distribute, and unpackage, SVN allows access to an online repository for my Robocode project StrafeNShoot, and any modifications made to the StrafeNShoot project SVN updates and commits the actions to the online repository.
The online repository we have used is Google Code, Google's developer network of open source projects.

My personal Google Code repository can be found here.

It currently stores the most up-to-date version of StrafeNShoot, summarizes the robots strategy, and contains two Wiki pages that show the User Guide and Developer Guide. You can either download the .zip format of the distribution, or can Checkout the project using SVN.

Note: Anyone can Checkout the project Anonymously, but if you would like to be a Project Member and/or commit or receive update notifications, I will have to add your Gmail account to my project. If you would like to be added, feel free to e-mail the discussion group at robocode-etm-strafenshoot-discuss@googlegroups.com

Along with Google Code, I have created a Google Discussion Group for my Google Code Project. All updates to StrafeNShoot are automatically posted in the discussion for everyone to see (including non-developers). This allows developers and others to see updates that have been going on and where the project is headed.

This weeks assignment details can be found here.

I've completed all the tasks except the known issue of the codesite-noreply@googlecode.com to the discussion group. However, I did get a workout this and instead added my Google Code project URL, robocode-etm-strafenshoot@googlecode.com to my discussion group. Then add the group's discussion e-mail (robocode-etm-strafenshoot-discuss@googlegroups.com) to the Activity Notifications in the Admin Source page of the Google Project, this allows for the updates to be e-mailed to all the discussion group members.

The most difficult task I found was using SVN. After installing SVN, you don’t actually open SVN the program, but use the Right-Click menu in the repository folder. The order of steps to use SVN was unintuitive at first. After modifying any of the files in my project, I had to first "update" the repository, then “commit” the actions. Remembering/re-pasting my Google Code project is a slight pain, but manageable.

I did accidently activate the "Adult Content Warning" when creating my Google Group. I inadvertently checked it off thinking it said that "My group does NOT contain any Adult Content". I looked through Google Group's help site, but found that only Google Administrators are able to change my Content Policy. I've posted my request on the site hoping they'll soon change it. I learned my lesson in that I should read carefully before checking off options that involve “Adult” and “content”.

Google Groups help was also useful in looking for known issues such as codesite-noreply, and already existing cases of accidental “Adult Content” activation.