Recently I’ve been trying to bring an app running on a somewhat-old Python stack slightly more up-to-date. When this app was developed, the state of the art in terms of best practice was to use operating system packaging – RPM, in this case – as the means by which the application and its various attendant libraries would be deployed. This is a relatively rare mode of deployment even though it works fantastically well, because many developers are not happy maintaining the packaging-level skills required to maintain the system. From what I read the Mozilla systems administrators deploy their applications using this system.
I’ve been a Zend Framework user for a while. I’ve been using PHP long enough to appreciate the benefits of a good framework, and developed a number of sophisticated applications using ZF, to have grown a certain fondness for it. Although it has a reputation for being difficult to get into, being slow and being overly complicated – not undeserved accusations, if we’re being honest – there is something quite appealing about it. Well, was, for me at least. ZF 1.11 looks like the last version of the framework I will be using.
This morning was the big “Dart language” unveil – the Dart websites are up at http://dartlang.org and http://dart.googlecode.com. And already many seasoned Javascripters have the knives out. I’m surprised for a couple of reasons: the first, this isn’t quite as big a deal as many people thought it would be (me included), both in terms of the scope of the system and the distance to Javascript. Second, the system isn’t quite as finished as many predicted: this isn’t going to be usable for a little while.
(For those looking for an rpm rant, sorry, this isn’t it….!)
Currently there’s a ticket in front of FESCo asking whether or not alternative dependency solvers should be allowed in Fedora’s default install. For those who don’t know, the dependency solver is the algorithm which picks the set of packages to install/remove when a user requests something. So, for example, if the user asks for Firefox to be installed, the “depsolver” is the thing which figures out which other packages Firefox needs in order to work. On occasion, there is more than one possible solution – an obvious example often being language packs; applications usually need at least one language installed, but they don’t care which.
Just yesterday people jumped on the biographies and abstract for a talk at goto: the Keynote is Google’s first public information on Dart, a “structured programming language for the world-wide web”. Beyond knowing a couple of the engineers involved – which allows a certain amount of inference to take place – there’s also some speculation that Dart is what this “Future of Javascript” email referred to as “Dash” (this seems entirely possible: a dash language already exists; Google already used ‘Dart’ for an advertising product but have since stopped using that name, potentially to make way for the language).
Scott James Remnant blogged his ideas about how to improve the quality of Ubuntu releases recently, triggering some discussion at LWN about the topic. I offered some opinions about Ubuntu which are not terribly interesting because I don’t get to use it often; however, I did also write about Fedora based on the last couple months’ experience of Fedora 15 & 16.
Before I get to that, at roughly the same time, Doug Ledford was posting his thoughts about the “critical path” process – essentially, saying it was broken. I’m pretty sure he will find vociferous agreement with his views, based on previous feedback, but not (alas) from me.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the above question for a number of different reasons. For people who really study programming, like I attempt to, there are a number of claims/myths/legends/tales that are commonly held about people who cut code for a living, such as:
- some programmers, the “alphas”, are as much as ten times more efficient than the common programmer;
- there are people who “get” computers, and those who don’t. Cooper splits these into “humans” and “homo logicus”. Those who don’t grok computers are destined to never be able to program;
- there are people who are paid to cut code, and who simply can’t – they rely on auto-complete IDEs, cut’n’paste library code, etc.;
For the purposes of this post, I’ll separate between these different concepts: the “goats” (people who cannot code, at all), the “sheep” (people who code, perhaps professionally, but poorly) and the alphas. Sheep and alphas are collectively referred to as coders.
Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se, but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north. Sutton, the local town, had some windows broken by youths, but to be honest this isn’t exactly exceptional behaviour in Sutton.
Many words have been expended on this situation. I don’t have an awful lot to add about the project side of things: I think it’s immensely sad that OpenOffice.org is being forked again (this is much more clearly a fork than LibreOffice was), but fundamentally all actors within the free software world are autonomous and have free will. Such is life.
(this is a deeply opinionated blog post. feel free to skip it, take it with a grain of salt, whatever.)
This has been an interesting election. I’ve talked about previous ones before, and to be honest this one has felt a little bit of a let-down. I do wish that there were more candidates on offer: while this isn’t a criticism of the quality of people standing, I think they tend to represent a relatively narrow set of Fedora developers and users.
Anyhow, I’ve voted. I’m not going to disclose who I voted for or why, but here are the guiding principles I used:
