User Reviews
over 2 years
ago
Git:
Git - it's what I use
by
merlyn
After having fought various version control systems over the decades, git is a breath of fresh air. Git is a system that is optimized for independent development, where branching and merging are the rule, rather than the exception. Git also provides a compact complete history of the entire project for every repository: compact enough that the current checkout for the linux kernel is twice the size of the entire 2.6 history! Git encourages proper
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development processes, and supports legacy centralized modes of operation as well as distributed development and tiered acceptance. Git plays well with others, having the ability to import and export CVS and SVN and others. My only complaint about git is "why wasn't it around ten years earlier - it would have saved me so many headaches!". [Less]
32 of 33 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
ago
Subversion:
Sure it's not edgy, but it's not junk either
by
Rob Heittman
Subversion was chartered specifically to create a drop-in replacement for CVS -- something that worked similarly, but was friendly to the HTTP infrastructure and addressed some key limitations like the ability to version the directory tree structure. It's done what it set out to do, it's reached a stage of maturity and ubiquity, and I've found it to work reliably and well.
Of course most of the interesting work on source control is now
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being done elsewhere, in projects that intentionally aren't carrying any baggage from CVS and before.
I'm sure at some point in the not too distant future, my team will be moving to something like git, because that's indeed the next evolutionary step. Who wouldn't want smaller working copies, faster updates, and better, legacy-free approaches to merge drudgery, etc?
But more integrations and tool support are needed -- as well as working connectors for services like Ohloh, and project hosting at places like Google Code, Sourceforge, etc, before I can fully make the leap to a late-model revision control platform, instead of just dabbling. I'm doing my little bit to push that forward, working on a git integration with our content management platform and bugging my vendors for git support.
Anyway, Subversion has been a good friend at work for about 5 years, and will be for a while longer before we move on ... and I don't feel any need whatsoever to beat it up for not being designed from scratch in the 21st century. We'll move on someday, but we won't go away mad.
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22 of 25 users found the following review helpful.
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over 3 years
ago
by
TheAlienist
If you need to compile C/C++ then save yourself some headaches AND money. Skip the commerical compilers and use GCC. The amount of R&D on this project surpasses that of the commercial alternatives (yeah, including Microsoft C/C++ Compiler).
21 of 24 users found the following review helpful.
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over 3 years
ago
by
ThomasWaldmann
After having used CVS and GNU arch (tla) before, we switched to Mercurial about a year ago for MoinMoin development.
As well as tla has been a big step forward compared to CVS, Mercurial is another big step forward from tla.
We don't regret it, Mercurial works great:
* we never had serious trouble with it, we never lost data
* it is FAST (much faster than GNU arch)
* the commands are easy to remember and have sane
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defaults, so you get used to it fast
* it is well-designed
* it uses your disk space efficiently
* it doesn't need a central server, you can use version control on the road without internet connection
* it runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, ...
* it has a nice web interface built-in (you don't even need a separate web server)
* you can read its code (it is mostly Python! CLEAN python code, with a bit of C for better performance.)
* it has very few dependencies (well, it needs Python, of course, but not much else)
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18 of 20 users found the following review helpful.
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over 3 years
ago
by
TheAlienist
In all my years of open source development, postgresql stands out as the most amazing open source product I've used. It's full-featured and rock solid. Even its documentation is better than commercial databases.
Imho, the whole MySQL vs Postgres debate is pointless. Postgres is a better database in all aspects that matter (ie: except for a few contrived ISAM-based performance tests).
Some minor gripes include overcomplicated
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config files and a few missing SQL niceties. Otherwise, no complaints. Hats off to the dedicated postgres team.
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16 of 16 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
ago
Subversion:
Why are you still using Subversion?
by
mugwump
The design roots of Subversion can be traced back to the first very simplistic attempts at version control, such as SCCS and RCS. The design of it has steamrolled on from the 70's with little consideration of stable internet development methods practiced since at least the mid-eighties.
The claim is made that Subversion "just fixes CVS". And while Subversion is generally more robust and versatile than CVS, some still see it as
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a step backwards. Unlike CVS, SVN is hard to fix when it goes wrong - there are no user-servicable parts inside. Branches and even tags are denied first class recognition by the system, no doubt borrowing some design from Perforce but missing the important bit that made it work (p4's integration - only now being added with "merge tracking"). CVS fixed? Hardly - CVS re-engineered as a cripple. (For a true "drop-in" replacement for CVS that fixes the most important bugs of CVS and doesn't remove features, try git-cvsserver)
Don't buy the "svn 1.5 will fix merging" snake-oil; the new design is still vastly deficient compared with the real A-class tools out there today, such as Git, Bazaar-NG and Mercurial. It might be almost as good as Perforce, hooray you've caught up to 10 years ago. That's if we ever see a release - since last November, the Subversion team have managed 6 minor releases, compared to git's 1 major release, 3 minor releases, 30 stable releases and 26 stable release candidates. There really is no comparison.
As for the speed, after using Git or Mercurial for a while, you go back to SVN and you seriously start to think it's broken or hung - then you realise no, it's just slow. Especially if you are trying to treat your code as a revision data warehouse, for techniques such as code annotation or bisection.
As far as "using HTTP infrastructure" - this is an oversold benefit - note that Subversion is actually using HTTP+WebDAV as a horrific delivery mechanism for its XML-RPC messages. There's nothing standard about it at all - and that's ignoring the fact that WebDAV required us all to upgrade our webservers. Some users were forced into an upgrade treadmill to install the specific, alpha version of Apache that was required.
By my own observation, virtually every proponent of Subversion left either has a significant stake in it, or has simply never tried any other system. They are in another world - a world where removing the ability to do sane branching, merging and tagging was construed as a feature. The net effect is that the open source community is now left with a legacy of useless history for the 5 years or so that the SVN fad has taken the world by storm. This legacy is not caused by the difficulty in conversion - not at all - but more from the dreadful development practices its idiotic design promotes. The buzz word of "commit bit" disguises a widespread practice of skimping on code review. Sure, it might be possible to figure out what the individual changes are in that repository, but who can dig them out from the mess of commits? And with sufficiently few eyeballs to review changes, all code bases are buggy.
And buggy it certainly is. Virtually every project I encountered that tried to use its API - assuming they could figure its crazy system of batons and allocation pools and callbacks out - were mired with random segfaults and difficult to track down core bugs.
Subversion has already become a modern relic; it's a zombie project unable to make stable releases or effectively manage their spaghetti codebase. Abandon ship now.
(NOTE: not that I don't have some good things to say about it, see for instance http://use.perl.org/~mugwumpjism/journal/30574, and also http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/intro.html#sux ) [Less]
50 of 85 users found the following review helpful.
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over 2 years
ago
by
darrint
Python is an excellent language for getting all kinds of work done. For OO programmers it offers a dynamic object model.
It's not difficult to find good reviews of Python on the Internet, so I'll focus on it's weaknesses.
Out-of-the box Python lacks popular high-level concurrency support. There is no high level interprocess communication library, no lightweight processes, no transactional memory etc.
To address this one
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can either "roll-their-own" or look into Twisted or Stackless Python. In the case of Twisted one must commit to an "unnatural" programming model. Stackless requires recompiling python.
One this commitment is made there are significant communities behind both projects, however, these communities are tiny in comparison to the mainstream python community.
Python also lacks a macro or similar facility. The official position of the Python maintainer is that python will never had such a facility.
Python also lacks out of the box support for "freezing" apps into bundles which can be run on machines lacking an os provided python interpreter, or an older version of one than desired. Assembling these bundles for the big three major desktop operating systems, Windows, OS X, and Linux, requires tracking down a lot of software all over the web and doing a lot of scripting if the app in questions is non-trivial.
Currently, popular python libraries for doing this are py2exe for Windows, py2app for OS X, and cx_freeze for Posix.
Buildbot (a twisted application, see above) is popular for running build farms and automating testing and app bundle building.
Despite these flaws, python is an practical language for getting work done in a timely manner and having a maintainable codebase when finished.
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14 of 14 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
ago
ReactOS:
Could this be the future of Windows?
by
Robert Menes
Let's face it: I'm not a fan of Windows. I never was, and never will be. Why? Crashes, buffer overflows galore, lack of security, and the oh so famous BSOD.
Yet I have to support it. So I did have to get used to it.
When I started using Wine on my Linux box to test some Windows software, I discovered ReactOS, and saw that it shared some libraries with Wine. I also saw that it reproduced the Windows look and feel, but did so
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without any of the flaky Microsoft code under the hood.
That's right, this is a completely different beast here.
I've since downloaded and tried several of the alpha versions, and have been pleasantly surprised. Even from the start, ReactOS plays fair, listens to you (instead of you listening to it), and ran a good amount of Windows software right out of the box. Games that support OpenGL (e.g. Quake, Unreal) ran great, and with some of the recent work done, more complex applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org now run with little trouble!
Best of all, the system requirements for ReactOS are very low; a 32MB system will happily boot ReactOS, and the entire installation on my test machine (an old Pentium 120 laptop with 48 MB RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive) took up a slim 50MB. Most of the hardware on the laptop wasn't supported (the sound system wasn't recognized, but ROS currently doesn't have full sound support anyway), but what worked does so with gusto.
This certainly is a great project in the works. An open source Windows-like environment for those who either don't want to or are unable to run Linux; ReactOS is one project I am truly going to watch. [Less]
14 of 15 users found the following review helpful.
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over 2 years
ago
PuTTY:
Helps fill the gaps in windows
by
Michael Guymon
Where Windows is missing a ssh client, PuTTY is there to the rescue. I have used putty for years on multiple windows version, the no frills ssh client does everything you need. Can be run from cmd shell or from directly clicking hte executable, just download and go.
13 of 13 users found the following review helpful.
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over 3 years
ago
Subversion:
Why are you still using CVS?
by
GrumpyOldMan
Subversion is what CVS should have been. It's no mystery that projects are moving en masse from CVS to Subversion.
Subversion follows the same client/server model as CVS, but is a strictly better implementation. Subversion's command line tools will feel familiar to anyone comfortable with CVS, and most of the clever accessories like Tortoise and online code browers are available for Subversion. It's worth making the switch for the
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elegant, efficient branching and tagging alone.
All this being said, I think the client/server source control model is on the way out. I highly recommend taking a look at Git or Darcs, which use a decentralized model that doesn't require a central server. [Less]
26 of 40 users found the following review helpful.
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