README.dev

This is a README file for developers. If you are not a developer, you'll likely
find this file rather boring.

Versioning
==========
NIPAP follows the pretty common version format of major.minor.patch. What
constitutes major and minor features is of course difficult to tell and as we
intend to release rather often we will likely end up with a minor version bump
for every feature. This could lead to something like the Linux kernel which
staid at 2.6 for pretty long before Linus bumped it to version 3.0 with no real
major changes, it was just the right time. I think that will work well for us
as well.

I don't believe in date-based (like Ubuntu) versioning as we release when
things are done, not according to some artificial deadline.

Build debian packages
=====================
Building debian packages out of the nipap packages is fairly simply, just go to
the root of the NIPAP source directory and do a 'make builddeb'.

Building a debian repo
======================
This step is for the official maintainers of NIPAP but could possibly be used
by other wanting to set up an alternative debian repo of NIPAP.

The repo itself is hosted by GitHub through their support for building a
webpage via the branch gh-pages, please see http://help.github.com/pages/ for
more information on that.

The Makefile includes a target ('debrepo') to build the necessary files for a
debian repo and put this in the correct place.  As soon as a commit is pushed,
github will copy the files and produce a webpage accessible via http://<github
user>.github.com/<project name>. We use this to build a simple apt repository
hosted on GitHub.

To update the apt repo, build the debian packages, then run 'make debrepo' in
the project root. Commit to the gh-pages branch and then push and it should all
work! :)