What do we have now?¶

Right now the majority of the new features already exist within mbed.org in some form.

Regular users will be familiar with publising and importing programs and libraries, which has been a very popular feature, with over 7000 versions of programs and libraries published.

However, some types of more collaborative workflows are more difficult than they should be.

For example it's not easy to really work together on a program or library, because:

• It's difficult to see exactly who changed what code and when.
• There's no way to automatically merge two sets of changes to a published program
• There's no way to allow other people to make changes to a published program

Furthermore some of the underlying technical details of how code publishing works on mbed means that we have ruled out gradual improvement or tinkering around the edges; a completely new approach is required!

Migration strategy¶

This upgrade affects many parts of the mbed system. This means that the migration from the old system to the new system has to be carefully managed in order to ensure that:

• The new system can be trialled adequately by users before general release
• No work or code is lost during the transition
• Users can try out the new features, without risk to their data/workspace
• The new features should seamlessly integrate into the site, without creating extra confusion

With that in mind:

• All published programs will be converted to the new repositories.
• History of published programs will be copied and all links will still work
• The new mbed compiler will automatically convert any libraries into their repository equivalents

While in the testing phase:

• The main live site will remain completely unaffected during the beta phase of collaboration 2.0

• The beta site will track the live site
  • Periodically, any new updates or new published programs will be converted into the new repositories feature.
  • New versions of published programs as well as new published programs will be converted
  • Therefore, the 'new world' will track the existing livesite with a small delay. (some minutes)

• If a repository which has been converted from an existing published program is modified on the beta site, future updates of the published program will not overwrite the repository.