'Best Practices' for code repositories & release schedule?

[Hiketeia]

Hi,

New addon-er here and just wondering how others feel about code repositories and things? I like GitHub, and if I was just making it for myself I'd keep it in there and be fine with it. But since the addon sites seem to each have their own repo, should I use them? Do people use multiple? Do they script updates to them all, or do they only push 'releases' to the main sites? Comments/tickets/issues and things are probably not something to worry about now, but I don't want to have to change things unnecessarily down the road either.

Thoughts?

Along with this thought too, is how soon is too soon to release? If I've imagined for myself 3 main functions of the addon and have one done, should I release early and often - or wait until I'm more feature complete and go from there? I like the idea of getting feedback as I go and things, but at the same time, don't want people to try it once and not try it again if it isn't all there?

[Lombra]

I am by no means a professional developer, but I would hate to use several repositories for the same project. Curse has some support for external repos, though, and I believe you can set up WoWI to pull from Curse. Personally I like using SVN with externals, so Github is no good for me, otherwise I might have used that. I only use the Curse repo.

As for releasing.. well, you can always flag new files as alpha or beta. If stuff barely works or not at all there's no point releasing that, but if the basic functionality is there it should be good for at least alpha. Beta when you've almost finished it and just need to sort out some details or get some feedback/bug testing going. Release when you've done everything you planned to and fixed all known, fixable problems. That's generally what I do, anyway. From there on, if you add features, I would say release as often as you want to, as long the newly implemented features are working as they should, unless you have reason to delay.

[Folji]

If you ask me, release time should be release time. If it's at a point where you feel you could use it yourself, then it's ready for release. Of course there's nothing wrong with releasing early, getting test versions out for people to play around with, try out, and give feedback on. Especially if it's a big project with a lot going on!

But generally, if it's not ready for regular use then it's not *really* ready for release. Posting a showcase thread on the forum is always one way to get your stuff out there prior to actually releasing it!

[p3lim]

Originally Posted by Lombra Curse has some support for external repos

Doesn't work correctly, will be fixed in the revamp of CurseForge for WoW.

[Rainrider]

I use github for development and issue tracking, and wowace for distribution and localization. For that just setup a git repo for your wowace project and add it as a remote to your local repo. You can then push the same code to both wowace and github. The wowace packager uses annotated tags to make a release version of your addon and it appears on both wowace and curse. You could also use .pkgmeta if you need more control over the packager.

I haven't published an addon to wowinterface yet, so don't know how this works.