Praising the Good

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I frequently gripe about how backward scientific software development is, so it's only fair that I give praise where praise is due. Steve Easterbrook pointed me at the UK Met Office's Flexible Configuration Management system, which combines code management using Subversion and Trac with a GNU Make-based build and an extraction system that pulls data out of the repository and builds it for particular platforms. This image shows how the three parts fit together; it ain't rocket science, but it's very professional, and a good model for others to follow.