Working with Configuration Management

So far, I have had a little experience with configuration management and version control systems.  I have currently worked with Unfuddle and recently posted a project on Google Project Hosting.  Both of these sites allow for free project management tools and each has SVN hosting.  I enjoy working with Unfuddle since it has many useful features, not the least of which is the ability to close tickets from within your SVN commit message.   My experience with both of these systems has been extremely positive! 

For now, I am going to focus on the project that I recently set up on Google Project Hosting.  If you managed to read my last post about a rather dismal Robocode robot named Tankadin, then you know that the robot is not going to win many championships.  However, creating the robot, its build system, and now having set up project hosting for it, has all been an interesting endeavor.  I have learned a lot about the Java based Ant build system and how to manage a project locally.  From there, I have learned more about how to actually host a project and start up a subversion repository.  I've already been using subversion for a few months now, so I started this project out with a degree of familiarity.

While I am already used to the idea of configuration management tools due to my experience with Unfuddle, I continue to learn and expand my capabilities and experience as I learn and use other tools.  As far as open source projects go, Google Project Hosting is decent in that you can easily set up wiki pages for the general public to inform people of your project and allow for easy downloading to anyone.   For my Robocode project, I added a User Guide page which shows anyone how to download and install my robot, Tankadin for target practice.  I have also included a Developer Guide that describes what dependencies are needed to make much needed improvements to the robot, as well as information about how to checkout a working copy from the SVN repository.  For the developer guide page, I copied the template from another Robocode project.

Right now, I only have one other member to the project, although I would welcome anyone that wanted to work on the robot.  My goal is to continue working on the project when I finish more of my current responsibilities and have some free time to spare.  If you stumble upon this page, please feel free to check out the project and see what changes have been made.  I have a link to it in the first paragraph, but you can also click here.