User Reviews
[636 total ]
6 months
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]
21 of 21 users found the following review helpful.
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2 months
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 a step
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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]
28 of 41 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
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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12 of 12 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
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]
15 of 20 users found the following review helpful.
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about 1 year
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).
10 of 10 users found the following review helpful.
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9 months
ago
Python:
Mature, Good OO
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.
[Less]
9 of 9 users found the following review helpful.
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8 months
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.
9 of 9 users found the following review helpful.
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10 months
ago
Python:
Python is great!
by
ThomasWaldmann
Python is the best general-purpose programming language I ever used (having studied CS and being a geek, I used or looked at quite a lot of them in the last 25 years).
It is new enough to be well-designed and high-level.
It is mature enough to be very useful and well-behaved.
Coding in Python is easy, fun and going fast.
You can easily read code (no matter if it is your own code or code of someone else), because it
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is high-level and clean.
You can easily write code. The code volume you need to get something done is usually much less than in other programming languages (and this is not just about typing stuff, having less code means also less bugs, less maintenance costs).
Often you don't have to write code, as it comes with a good standard library that contains lots of useful and easy to re-use code. There are also lots of python modules available on the internet.
You can easily debug code. You can try code in the interactive interpreter. No need to compile the code, just run it.
There are great IDEs for Python, e.g. Eclipse/PyDev or Eric (plus many others I didn't use yet).
You can easily get platform-independent code (runs on Linux, Mac, Win32 and many others).
If you have questions, there is a big community of python coders (web sites, irc channels, mailing lists, news groups, user groups).
[Less]
8 of 8 users found the following review helpful.
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6 months
ago
SQL-Ledger:
Full-featured but Fragile
by
einhverfr
I always like to structure my reviews by starting with the good, then the bad, then a general summary. I hope others find this helpful.
The Good:
SQL-Ledger boasts an impressive feature set. The latest major release added support for vouchers, and a number of other things on top of an already impressive feature set. And although the application requires that you understand some basic accounting, you could possibly use this system
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to manage the money of most types of small buisnesses. Aside from SQL-Ledger (and probably LedgerSMB, a project I am involved in), I cannot find any open source accounting programs with a comparable feature set.
The Bad:
The SQL-Ledger author treats security issues as a very low priority. He feels that because the application is only of interest to bookkeepers and accountants, that security really isn;t a major concerns (note however that these people could use security flaws to steal your money).
A second major problem is that the codebase is bad shape (and that is being kind). Constructs like \%$form, and variable names like $a are found throughout it. The author apparently does not use any soruce code management solution, and is actually hostile towards other contributors, which compounds every problem listed here.
The third major problem is that the database is poorly designed. There is a general lack of data constraints, he uses floating point values to store money which are not arbitrary-precision safe, and there are no defined primary or foriegn keys, This makes customizing the application fairly dangerous.
Summary:
All in all I gave the project a 1 becase although it is quite useful, the lack of any real security, and the design issues make the software downright dangerous to use.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a founding member of the LedgerSMB project which began as a fork from this project. [Less]
8 of 8 users found the following review helpful.
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10 months
ago
Fedora:
A nice little operating system
by
YoavShapira
Easy to set up, easy to maintain, works well out of the box. No complaints here...
7 of 7 users found the following review helpful.
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