How do I manage 3rd party add ons and source control

[clendon.gibson@canrig.com]

Some developers friends of mine just got burned because a 3rd party add on to LabVIEW they use in thier code was not in the Software repository. They needed to go back and rebuild a previous version, but it was not immedietely obvious which version of the add on belonged to which version of the source code.

The 3rd party helped make this worse by being perfectly happy to change the pin outs on the API VIs in between revisions.

So they could not simply select a non buggy version of the add on and a non buggy version of the source and compile.

In some cases we have put 3rd party add ons in the source directory so they become part of the SVN project. My friends had them where they where installed, which was under the vi.lib folder.

This does not always work. For example the Internet Toolkit's FTP code has so many layers that it can be a challenge to get them all moved over. If you want to have the ability to overwrite local files when doing a get, you need to make a small change about 5 layers down in the VIs. We basically have to do this for every developer machine that has LV 8.5 on it. (LV 2010 fixed this. It was the first thing we checked.)

So I am wondering what other LV professionals do to manage revision control of 3rd party add ons.

Thanks!

[Mark_Yedinak]

I generally created a ZIP file of the entire third party tool and all of its pieces. Generally they are well enough behaved that everything is at least under a single folder in the file system. I then check this file into source code control. Another optio would be to use JKI's Package Manager. You could create your own local packages of the third party tool and use VIPM to manage those packages. I generally don't put any of NI's toolkits in source code control.