Ask HN: Best practices for integrating open source project into your code base

1 point

9 years ago

I'm currently writing code for an undergraduate robotics club. Our code is open source and we host it on github. We've recently been using someone else's code that we get from github.

I'm hoping to get advice on how to integrate this code into our repo. Currently we have in our repository a bash script that creates a directory in the users home directory, clones this other repo into said directory, and then runs the commands to build the repo and configure the users environment so it can get at the compiled objects.

This solution works but I think it is a little ugly, would it make more sense to include this other repo in our code base? how do we keep up with their changes if we do it that way? Are there licensing issues? We are using GPL v2, they are on apache2.0.

for reference here is our code : https://github.com/robotics-at-maryland/qubo

and theirs : https://github.com/uuvsimulator/uuv_simulator

Thank you.