Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Sat Sep 22, 2018 6:22 pm

Is there a build of Open Dental 18.1 available (ideally with install shield)?

On a related note, are there general builds available (e.g. release history). This would be helpful for maintaining Plugins across a series of OD versions.

Post by **jsalmon** » Sun Sep 23, 2018 4:02 pm

Every version of Open Dental is publicly available. If you are looking into building your own stable or beta versions then I highly recommend checking out a revision that has a specific version as the commit log. These are officially released builds of Open Dental that are safe to use (not in the middle of being worked on).
https://www.opendental.com/site/sourcecode.html

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 5:38 pm

Thanks for the quick reply.

Please correct me, what I heard below was:
"Open Dental doesn't provide a history of builds per se, instead OD exposes SVN and the team creates Tags/Labels when specific releases are chosen. If you need to reproduce the product at a specific version, OD's suggestion is to find the specific Tag in the revision history that identifies the version you're looking for, and perform a Release build of the product at that point in the revision history. This should be identical to the assemblies that OD released at that time."

Is that pretty close? I was hoping for some archive of old releases, but can absolutely work with the above. Please let me know if it's accurate

.

Post by **jsalmon** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 8:58 pm

That is correct. We don't have a public repository that hosts every version in executable format if that is what you're looking for.

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Thu Oct 18, 2018 10:13 pm

I've been pulling from the same label/tag (opendental18.1)...but in continues to change (new files, version# changes). It also shoots holes in the earlier conversation.

Problem: How do I reproduce a specific version of Open Dental? If the About->Help reads "Open Dental 18.1.55"...how would one reproduce that specific version of the product?

Post by **jsalmon** » Sun Oct 21, 2018 7:06 am

tholmes wrote:I've been pulling from the same label/tag (opendental18.1)...but in continues to change (new files, version# changes). It also shoots holes in the earlier conversation.

Problem: How do I reproduce a specific version of Open Dental? If the About->Help reads "Open Dental 18.1.55"...how would one reproduce that specific version of the product?

One would...

jsalmon wrote:...checking out a revision that has a specific version as the commit log. These are officially released builds of Open Dental that are safe to use (not in the middle of being worked on).
https://www.opendental.com/site/sourcecode.html

E.g. Revision #20614 has a log message of "version 18.1.55" thus if you check revision #20614 out then you would be compiling the aforementioned version as we released it to the public. Revision #20636 is "version 18.1.56", etc.

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Sat Oct 27, 2018 8:23 pm

Thanks Jason I appreciate it.

Forgive the confusion, but this is typically what Tags are used for in SVN (and other source control systems) as opposed to check-in comments. It's a little cumbersome, but I'm happy to dig/search through comments to find the revision that correctly identifies a build/release.

In fact, these aren't used as Tags, they're Branches (identical tech, different semantics/usage in SVN).

This shouldn't read as "you're doing it wrong",

but it's fair to say that other developers will likely be confused by this construct and expect a given "Tag" that looks like a release (e.g. "opendental18.1") to be immutable.

Either way, thanks for the reply. Very helpful.

My Best,
Tyler

A note on subversion project structure to help delineate Tags vs Branches as recommended by the CollabNet Subversion Book:
http://blogs.collab.net/subversion/subversion_repo

Tags as they pertain to releases:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn. ... .tags.html
https://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/To ... chtag.html

Post by **jsalmon** » Mon Oct 29, 2018 9:36 am

...Cheap copies are similar to hard links in Unix, which means that instead of making a complete copy in the repository, an internal link is created, pointing to a specific tree/revision. As a result branches and tags are very quick to create, and take up almost no extra space in the repository.

I always avoided them because I thought they were wasteful. It's good to see that they aren't. We've had several developers get bit by using a minor version that was mid-development. Using tags seems like the solution for that as well.

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Mon Oct 29, 2018 5:36 pm

Thanks for the note and open mind!

tholmes · Post by **tholmes** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 6:07 pm

For posterity, wanted to let this thread know that there ARE version specific builds available via Open Dental. Provided to paying customers only and housed on an internal share at the OD offices.

You can ask customer service or an installer to provide a specific build instead of doing the blind update (which puts you on the head version).

Confirmed by Spike at OD.

Open Dental Forum

Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

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Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

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Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)

Re: Access to Open Dental 18.1 (or other builds)