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The Grove Virtual PC

Travis CI status

The Grove is a virtual personal computer that runs in a web browser. You can write applications or operating systems in JavaScript that run on a Grove.

The Grove can download snapshots of itself, allowing you to save your work on your physical computer.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of a virtual machine: the Grove is a first-person video game in which your character does nothing but interact with a computer.

Screenshot of a Grove computer running a simple program

What's in the box?

This repository houses a general-purpose version of the Grove computer that has no operating system or other software installed. The intended audience is software developers who want to write an operating system or other software for the Grove.

Building from Source

  1. Clone or download this repo.
  2. Be sure you have node and npm installed.
  3. Run ./build.sh in the repo folder. This will run the tests and create a grove.html file.
  4. Open the created grove.html file in a web browser.

User Guide

For more information on how to use a Grove, check out the user guide at https://github.com/druidic/grove/blob/master/docs/index.md.

Version numbering system

The Grove uses two-part version numbers, of the form {release}.{patch}. The motivation for this system over the simpler alternative of numbering versions sequentially (1, 2, 3, etc.) is perhaps best illustrated with an example.

Suppose the latest and greatest Grove version is 2.0. This is the version you have installed. A few days after the release of 2.0, we discover that it has a bug that only appears on some browsers. We release version 2.1, which fixes the bug. Soon after, we also release version 3.0, which adds new features that didn't exist in 2.0. The question you now face is: should you upgrade? And if so, to what version?

That depends on whether you want the new features that 3.0 introduces. If you do, you can just upgrade to 3.0. But if you don't, you can feel confident in upgrading to 2.1, because that version only contains a bugfix and is otherwise identical to 2.0.

In general, versions that only change the second part (the patch number) are "safe to install". They will work with the Grove software you currently have, and will make your system faster and more stable. Versions that change the first part (the release number) need to be treated with more caution. They may drastically alter how the Grove system works, so software that you currently use might not run.

Note that the dot in a version number is just a divider, not a decimal point, so versions 2.1 and 2.10 are different (2.10 is the next patch version after 2.9, and is pronounced "two-dot-ten").

What if you upgrade to the wrong version and want to go back? Assuming you kept your old Grove snapshots around, you can just reuse an earlier snapshot. Also, you can always download old Grove versions from https://github.com/druidic/grove/releases.

Releasing

The below description of the release process applies only to beta releases (version 0.X). Once version 1.0 is released, the process will change.

  1. Cut a branch from master named release/0.X, where X is the version number.
  2. Bump the version number in version.js and commit it.
  3. Tag the commit with the version number in the format v0.X.
  4. git push origin HEAD and git push --tags.
  5. Run ./build.sh to generate grove.html.
  6. Create a Github release and upload grove.html.
  7. Upgrade the druidic.github.io website to the new version of the Grove. Update the download link to point to the grove.html file in the latest release.