Managing Software As Data¶

For existing software used in research, the appropriate citation, version and source should be documented.

For new software, as for data, the management issues are:

• backing up
• documentation

However, whereas data changes slowly / infrequently, software is subject to ongoing changes during a project. Source code for software usually consists of text files and should therefore be stored in a suitable version control system (e.g. Mercurial, Subversion, git). Binary releases of software may also be created as downloads for a project.

Additionally, software documentation has broader requirements - including both documentation to make the code maintainable (e.g. comments in the code, documenting APIs, Javadoc style documentation) and user documentation to explain how to install and use the software.

The Sound Software project provides software project management facilities for digital music and audio research including Mercurial version control, downloads, documentation, issue lists and wikis through its code repository

Other possible repositories for source code include:

• Sourceforge (Subversion, git, Mercurial, Bazaar, CVS)
• Google code (Subversion, git, Mercurial)
• github (git)
• bitbucket (git, Mercurial)

The Sound Software project information on choosing a version control system and provides a cross-platform, easy-to-use, graphical client for use with Mercurial.