Everest Clean-Up

It's been awhile since I've posted anything new on this blog and I must apologize, we've been very busy with various projects at the MARC-HI (now called MEDIC) and I haven't been able to post any updates.
One of the tasks that we've performed is a clean-up of the Everest source code, a migration to SVN, and a new roadmap for Everest features.

Clean-up of Source Code

The Everest source code has undergone some clean-up to facilitate the migration to SVN. This includes better documentation on the source code itself, clearer versioning (see roadmap) and some general enhancements to the way things are done in the Everest Framework.

Public SVN Access

The Everest source code is now publicly available via SVN at https://fisheye.marc-hi.ca/svn/Everest. Read only guest access is provided via the "Guest" account, patches can be submitted via the forums or e-mailed to an Everest team member.
The structure of the SVN repository is as follows:
/branches/1.0 – The branch from which the Everest 1.0 release was built
/branches/1.1 – The unstable "feature" branch for the 1.2 release of Everest
/trunk – Stable development trunk.
This branching structure may seem odd but we do have some rationale for structuring the repository like this. The development branches (odd numbers) are not guaranteed to compile or pass unit tests and are where we do the majority of our work on the main roadmap, whereas the trunk is always guaranteed to compile and pass regression tests and only includes new features that are stable.

New Versioning Scheme

The new Everest versioning scheme is as follows:

Major.Minor.Patch

Where Major is the major version (currently the 1.0 series) which are guaranteed to be backwards compatible with previous versions. Minor version numbers are revision or releases which introduce new functionality to the framework. Odd minor version numbers denote a development version whereas even numbers are releases (for example 1.1 is the development branch for 1.2 and 1.3 for 1.4, etc.).
Patches are normally used for tags and represent a collection of bug fixes for the framework components.
The team hopes that these changes will make Everest clearer and will open the gateway to encourage new developers to work on the framework. We're working on a methodology for allowing public commits to our repositories however this will most likely not be completed for quite some time.