Agenda - Preserving Your Preservation Tools

Learning Outcomes

Understand package management and distinguish between different practices relating to package objectives and chosen programming language.
Carry out package management operations in order to critically appraise current packages and propose changes.
Understand the importance of software licenses, versioning policy, and clear documentation and examples.
Apply best practices to create a simple package suitable for long term maintenance.
Evaluate options for managing configuration and behaviour relating to package installation, removal, upgrade and re-installation.
Analyse opportunities for automating package management and releases, maintaining a clear focus on the user rather than the developer.
Critically evaluate opportunities to generalise package management to allow the easy building and maintenance of packages on multiple platforms.
Recognise and assess opportunities to apply package management techniques in your own environment.

There will be trainers and speakers from the SCAPE Project partners including the Open Planets Foundation, The British Library, and the National Library of the Netherlands.

Wednesday 26 March

Day 1: Thinking Like a Package Maintainer

Time	Session	Learning outcomes
09:30 - 10:00	Registration
10.00 - 10:20	Introduction and aims Why software packaging matters Who will use your software? Making life easy for users. Software sustainability, can your project live without you? How a package maintainers perspective might help.	1
10:20 - 11:00	The Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) An introduction to APT What is a package / package manager? apt-get install and beyond. APT repositories and sources.	1, 2
11.00 - 11.15	Coffee
11.15 - 12.30	Anatomy of an APT package Looking at the internals of an APT package Unpacking an APT package. Everything in its right place: following convention. Managing dependencies. Package hooks: update-alternatives.	1, 2
12.30 - 13.30	Lunch
13:30 - 14:30	Maintaining an APT Package Creating and distributing your first package Packaging upstream development. The little details: Licensing, version numbers, changelog. Documentation, YES you heard me, documentation. When things go wrong: installation problems, using lintian.	3, 4, 5
14:30 - 15:00	The Bigger Picture: Continuous Deployment Making a software release business as usual Is releasing software a big deal? Only because we make it one. Beyond Continuous Integration to Continuous Deployment. Automate everything, developers should practise what they preach. BUT my project's too big, too complex, NO IT'S NOT. OR if it really is, reconsider.	6, 7
15:00 - 15:15	Coffee
15.15 - 16:30	Robots: For Package Maintainers Using GitHub,Vagrant and friends to automate software releases Tools and services take the pain out of packaging. What's awkward to automate? Create and automated packaging and release workflow.	4, 5
16.30 - 17.00	Wrap up Summary and closing questions.
17.00	Close
20.00	Event dinner

Thursday 27 March

Day 2: Behaving Like a Package Developer

Time	Session	Learning outcomes
09.15 - 09.30	Welcome back Overview of agenda for the day
	Invited talk: My experience with Jpylyzer
09:30 - 09:50	The Bigger Picture: DevOps Software development and IT operations in harmony An introduction to DevOps. Develop using the platform and tools of your choice. Test and deploy on the platform chosen by IT Ops. Opportunities for collaboration.	6
09.50 - 11.15	Robots: For Developers Automating the development workflow Starting your project as you mean to go on. Ingredients for a personalised automated workflow. Python projects. C/C++ projects. Java projects. Version numbers and changelogs. Packaging development snapshots.	6, 7
11.15 - 11.30	Coffee
11.30 - 12.30	Going Public Using public, free infrastructure Sharing your test and deployment environment. Using Travis-CI, a public Continuous Integration service. An introduction to BinTray for software releases.	7, 8
12.30 - 13.45	Lunch
13.45 - 15.00	Packaging for Other Platforms Applying these principles to other OSs Translating to RPM, exe, etc. Alien for quick creation of RPM from an APT package. Using Vagrant to create real packages for other distros. A look at the Open Build Service for cross distro packaging. Support of Mac and Windows users.	7, 8
15.00 - 15.15	Coffee
15.15 - 16.30	Open Session Build your own package.	8
16.00 - 16.30	Wrap up Questions, discussion and event evaluation
16.30	Close

Register at: https://scape-preserving-tools.eventbrite.co.uk