Friday, July 30, 2010

Getting the code out - from Academic to Open Source

I am at the IGARSS conference in Waikiki , Hawaii. It has been a busy few days. All done with my presentations today, 2 posters side-by-side are rather easy to handle. The last presentation I attended today was from Eric Pottier on PolsarPro - a very brave attempt to get academic research in polarimetric SAR processing to the non-specialist user community. He mentioned that new routines and improvements get incorporated into the platform every week, so I naturally asked about the release schedule and possible version control access. This is where the academic heritage showed up, the project in-spite of its research brilliance does not have a hard working software engineer to smooth the getting it out there process. Collation of the work from the various developers and building the final release is done manually it seems.

The folks at Rennes 1 should take a leaf out of the OTB (or even RAT) book and make collaboration easier. In the recent release the simulator that I frequently use is broken and I can't report a bug or track the changes that broke it - version control please.

PS: I created a version control for myself , only for PolSARProSim.