Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2016
inventory-utils are aimed to support in task of organising information about collected physical items, using barcode reader and barcodes. Imagine food items in packages containing barcodes, and shelves in your kitchen labeled with barcodes or boxes with electronic items. This might be especially helpful in cellar, where you rarely go, and might be hard to remember not only in which box is what, but also what do the heck we even have in cellar.
Most barcode readers, can be attached as keyboard (e.g. via usb, bluetooth) and are visible as keyboard. So project assumed (at this point) standard input (keyboard/file/whatever).
Following KISS principle, I try to structure whole system into parts responsible for limited tasks, so they can be simple, specialised, understandable, finally leading to programs doing their tasks well.
For the overall task of items (currently mostly physical with barcodes are in my consideration) inventory, so far I've splited task into following parts and programs:
inventory-whereinventory-what
Modules will be layered, handling what they are supposed to handle, and providing below, resolved .inv format data. Basically it will be piped execution, kind of (draft): ./inventory-what -o >( ./inventory-where ) (TODO, provide picture with all pipes, plus bash script on filedescriptors for those who might want to intercept and modify data flow on some pipes).
Modules might prefix their input with timestamp, to allow other layers to interpret with same timestamp, or allow future replay of logs with same timestamps.
Under consideration:
inventory-contents- supporting in task of listing contents of containers, like generating lists "what is inside given box" that one can be print and sticked on a box.
Status: Currently worked on
inventory-where Is responsible for keeping track of "where is given item".
For more info, please check inventory-where-README.md.
Status: Gated on inventory-where
inventory-what is responsible for translating codes that are used to identify items, into richer and more meaningful to users descriptions, richer data.
- Manage information about items
- Support user in collecting such information
- for example ask user if one wants to provide more data each time new item is seen
- Help user to find code identifying interesting to him item
Apache License 2.0 is located in LICENSE file and based on auto generated template by Github, probably same as one here in overview: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/.
If anyone needs for any reason more permissive license (like BSD, X11 AKA MIT or even Public Domain), I am happy to release it under multiple licenses if there will be any reason, please get in touch with me - Grzegorz Wierzowiecki.
Therefore, all people contributing to this repository agree that code might be released even at Public Domain license at any point. I've chosen Apache License 2.0 currently as it seemed permissive enough and compatible to me with some other open source licenses - check License compatibility and License compatibility diagram - so one could use this code/project in project released on LGPLv3, GPLv3, while protecting user in patent cases (as opposed to more lax licenses like X11 AKA MIT, which lack of such protection clauses).
In order to provide framework for TDD (Test Driven Development), skeleton provides make test target that is supposed to return 0 on success and 1 on failure. Such is supposed to run all unit-tests. make test is triggered in .travis.yml automatically since commit https://github.com/inventory-utils/inventory-utils/commit/151264bdbb9b1043bfe43955912e63c4dbb1780a .
Continuous integration test is setup in .travis.yml and dashboard for all branches at: https://travis-ci.org/inventory-utils/inventory-utils/branches