How are other teams keeping their code updated with the FTC SDK?

[jrasor]

Same stinking post problem. Here's what I'm trying to give you (attached)

[jrasor]

Hi, Stephen!

We're Team 5197, "the GearHeads". All rookie 9th-11th grade team members this year. All team from last year gone. 2nd year coach.

General plan for modularized code, maintained in Android Studio and GitHub

1. 2016-2017 code will all go in one GitHub repository in about a week, with its existing configurations, with their jumbled collections of opmodes as they are. We ran, in succession, 3 robots: Rangerbot, Runnerbot, Sliderbot. That season

[markdmatthews]

Hi Stephen,

Our team works in our own fork of the FIRST FTC repository. We make our own changes in our fork (or branch) - do commits and pushes back up to github (for safe keeping, and sharing with team members), and when the SDK is updated we simply pull from upstream, We like to do that locally, not from within GitHub in case the merge needs some by-hand fixing (we've only had one issue and that was when a good chunk of the repository was removed to make it smaller...it caused serious merge issues, but everything since then has just worked). To make that work locally, you do what's called "adding a remote", like this:

git add remote upstream https://github.com/ftctechhn/ftc_app.git

Then when you want to "update" the SDK, you make sure all of your own code has been committed to your branch, and do "git pull upstream master" (or "upstream beta", or whatever).

Just note that you may have to update your team code when you pull from upstream as APIs change. We always make a copy before we pull from upstream so that we can easily back out if need be.


- Mark

[Stephen]

During the Velocity Vortex season, we tried using GitHub. It worked okay, but some of our programmers are changing this year and we are trying to understand GitHub more fully so that it serves its purpose.

One thing that I am trying to understand is how other teams are keeping their code with the FTC SDK. I have seen different ways of using a team's GitHub. Some teams back up their own copy of the official SDK while some teams only back up the Team Code folder. Last year, we ran into some issues when backing up the whole SDK. In addition, I was never sure how we could update the SDK without messing up our GitHub or code.

How do other teams update their GitHub and the FTC SDK? Should we be only backing up the Team Code folder?