Upslope on the learning curve
So, yeah, I can toss around a little Java now (emphasis on the little, of course), and I’m starting to consider tossing patches back in the general direction of DSpace.
Which means learning the Eclipse IDE/SDK gizmo. I say “gizmo,” but what I’m really talking about is a Swiss-army knife for programmers, multiplied by, oh, a gazillion or thereabouts.
Not that it isn’t cool. It is cool. It’s just bloody complicated.
So far I’ve gotten it to install, update itself, synch up to the DSpace tree on Sourceforge, syntax-color both Java code and JSPs (it doesn’t do JSPs natively; I had to grab a plugin), and make a patch file.
What I want it to do is manage all the stuff I’ve been hacking into the DSpace code. This is clearly going to take me a while to figure out… but the benefits should be impressive, especially when DSpace upgrades come out. Potentially, I could use Eclipse to manage code on both the staging and the production server (though I don’t actually like that idea much; too fragile).
Why is it complicated? Well, I don’t want to merge this stuff into the tree from Sourceforge, because that’s not latest-stable, it’s latest-and-greatest. So I’ll want a separate latest-stable tree in addition. When the latest-stable changes, I’ll have to figure out how to merge my changes to the formerly-latest-stable into the now-latest-stable, and I don’t know how to do that. Yet.
But I’ll figure it out. Eventually, and doubtless after much cursing. Sometimes the learning curve decides to change slope, is all.