{"id":328,"date":"2009-07-12T00:45:32","date_gmt":"2009-07-12T05:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/blog\/?p=328"},"modified":"2010-07-26T21:04:51","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T02:04:51","slug":"open-source-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/article\/open-source-is-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source is Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on getting my procedural texture library completed and released to the public which should be ready next week. I&#8217;m currently going through the difficulties that always go with getting that last bit of polish on a project to get it ready for public consumption. In particular, I&#8217;ve just switched over to maven as a build process and moved it into Project Kenai.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nEven though it doesn&#8217;t have any dependencies, Maven does help shape project structure and lets me deploy it in a structure that includes the source and lets users easily build the jar or the documentation. I&#8217;ve also had to deal with getting it into a subversion repository on Project Kenai. Originally I had it at Sourceforge (without source storage) but I decided to move it to Kenai.<\/p>\n<p>Granted, source control and build management  should have been done early on but this is a small project where I already make regular informal backups and the IDE handles building the single jar so I didn&#8217;t bother. Also, I wasn&#8217;t planning on making it open source originally but since I did, I wanted to get everything tidied away.<\/p>\n<p>On top of that, I&#8217;ve had to produce documentation, more so than if I was just using the library myself, and produce wiki pages, provide uploads, test the downloads to make sure they work, check that the download will work when installed to a maven repository, and provide instruction on how to use it from a maven repository etc. It&#8217;s a lot of work all for the sake of sharing a project with the world. I wouldn&#8217;t have to do most of that if I were keeping it to myself!<\/p>\n<p>However, it has taught me two things. One is to appreciate all the extra work that goes into managing an open source project above and beyond just putting a jar file on a web page for download. The other is a reminder to always start out with good practices (build processes and source control) from scratch if you even think the project might go public. This is a no-brainer if you know the project will be open source in advance, but probably should be followed just in case you decide to open source it later on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on getting my procedural texture library completed and released to the public which should be ready next week. I&#8217;m currently going through the difficulties that always go with getting that last bit of polish on a project to get it ready for public consumption. In particular, I&#8217;ve just switched over to maven [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[63],"tags":[6,37,35,36,118,39,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1069,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.andygibson.net\/old-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}