My team didn’t look at any of the API changes until kickoff when we downloaded the new code and ran our old code against it to check backwards compatibility.
Unfortunately, this broke a couple of very important components and we spent more of the following week fixing those issues than I would have hoped.
I am wondering when the earliest I could have accessed the API and its changes was? Could we have had access before kickoff or do they restrict it like they do the game details?
I would assume that WPI would have updated and tested everything long before competition. You could always look at http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/roborio/release/docs/java/deprecated-list.html (also probably one for cpp), but there are probably other changelists published by WPI. I haven’t seen any.
They likely don’t restrict the documentation before the kickoff, since it wouldn’t really give any hints.
But you can also access the source code through the usfirst.collab.net site too, there’s instructions on how to access it on screensteps somewhere. It’s a bit harder than browsing github though.
Isn’t the code being open before kickoff pretty new though? Correct me if I’m wrong, but non-beta teams historically weren’t able to access WPILib changes before the official release.
I might just have never found the correct way to get collabnet to cough of that code though.
That is correct, it is a fairly new thing, but in my opinion long overdue. I agree that working with collabnet is highly annoying, thus why we host a github mirror.
