[Developers] ADMB source code

[Arni Magnusson]

Thanks for clarifying this, John.

My interpretation of the plan you outlined is that (1) we aim to open 
anonomymous read-only access to the SVN repository around December, 
similar to

   svn co svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk gcc
   svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk R

and

   http://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs/trunk/
   https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/

(2) In the meantime, users like Allan/Ben/Ian/Jon can apply for read-only 
or even write access to the SVN repository. Once Johnoel creates an 
account for them, they can get the current source code via

   svn co svn+ssh://shibi.soest.hawaii.edu/admb/trunk admb-trunk

A snapshot of the source code from previous releases (now 9.1) will always 
be available, but that obelisk is not nearly as useful as read-only 
access, when it comes to user participation in ADMB development, and 
maintenance of packages like PBSadmb and R2admb.

---

My experience from submitting code to the R base packages is that 
read-only access is enough for most contributions. When I suggested 
extensions of bxp(), for example, Martin Mächler responded positively and 
worked on implementation details with me, before committing my changes. 
Likewise, Kurt Hornik liked my idea of creating aggregate.formula() and 
committed that function after we had modified it a bit. These cases 
involved 20-40 lines of code each, plus documentation, but the same would 
apply if there had been hundreds of lines. Write access would not have 
been useful, as dialogue with a development team member was a part of the 
process anyway. Having access to the current source code was critical, 
however, so I could test if the code would actually work.

User participation in the development of ADMB is already taking place, and 
we can expect it to increase (and become more efficient) once we open 
read-only access to the SVN repository.

Arni



On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, John Sibert wrote:

> Some of the folks on this list seem eager to try out the current 
> development version of ADMB on the project subversion server (as 
> distinct from the code on http://code.google.com/p/admb-project/). If 
> you want to give this code a try or simply have a look at it, please 
> write to Johnoel Ancheta <johnoel at hawaii.edu> for an account. If you 
> feel you want to contribute to the code, please let Johnoel know so he 
> can give you write access.
>
> We have not updated the source code on the google site because there are 
> still a (very) few proprietary issues that have yet to be resolved. We 
> plan to have all these issues resolved in November, make the code 
> available to this group for beta testing. Then, in December we will 
> update the sourc code and on the the google site.
>
> Cheers,
> John
>