[SCC_Active_Members] Software Archive Problem Statements?

[Van Snyder]

On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 23:03 -0700, Eric Petrich wrote:
> Al Kossow's recent e-mail requested that members hold off proposing
> solutions until the museum staff can create a requirements document.
> Or, as Grady Booch put it, before the problem is understood.

It's good to understand a problem before implementing a solution, but
it's also good not to conflate several problems that are only
superficially related, with the result that any single solution is worse
than several separate solutions.

For source code for software, we understand the problems (I think) and
there are several good solutions.

I hadn't appreciated that Subversion is an open-source project.  I
thought it was a commercial proprietary-format product.  I suggested CVS
or SCCS because I know they're open source, widely used, and depend upon
purely-character files.

I doubt they (or Subversion) are useful for pictures or binary code, and
I suspect that anything that's appropriate for pictures or binary code
will be suboptimal for text -- at least text that's represented as such
and not as images.

-- 
Van Snyder                    |  What fraction of Americans believe 
Van.Snyder at jpl.nasa.gov       |  Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?
Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or
disapproved by JPL, CalTech, NASA, the President, or anybody else.