Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote in message news:captjjmp_jfxth_l6us30gbotmbyhw_imu-pjdglevgj2nut...@mail.gmail.com... On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Frank Millman fr...@chagford.com wrote: This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. [...] Go public first, and watch what people get confused at - then document those parts. If you try to document everything first, you'll spend heaps of time and effort on it, and maybe won't even be happy with the result. I *think* I have created a project on GitHub and uploaded my software there. It is called AccInABox. This name probably needs a bit of explanation. Acc is an accountant. Box is the computer. You can set the system up with various rules and parameters, and then leave your staff to operate it without supervision. The program acts as your accountant, and will control what the staff can and cannot do. At the last count, there are about 10 million things I still have to do before it is a working product. But the structure feels quite stable now, and you can do a few simple things with it, so I am ready for people to have a look and offer feedback. I don't know GitHub at all, and I don't know what other information you need, so please let me know whether it works. Frank -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Frank Millman fr...@chagford.com wrote: I *think* I have created a project on GitHub and uploaded my software there. It is called AccInABox. https://github.com/FrankMillman/AccInABox Seems to be all there! You seem to have a default README.md as well as your README that has real content in it. If you delete README.md, the other one should become visible on the main project page. I'll shoot through a PR for that. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com wrote in message news:calwzidkro_hryamwxbk0go-w1oj6ty6myb_c5vhxb6okgol...@mail.gmail.com... Ugh. There seems to be no public repository, and the only source to be found is from release-versioned tarballs, so there's apparently no collaboration other than some forums for reporting bugs and requesting features. All the work is done by one developer in his spare time, and he is currently on hiatus since April. Meanwhile the most recent release is February, so it's not like somebody could just pick it up and start hacking and expect to merge. That's only open-source under the most literal of definitions. This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. I have had two attempts at running an hg repository locally, and I am afraid that I am not keeping it up to date. I do have a master copy, but I have made so many changes in my clone that a merge will not make any sense, so I will have to start afresh. I think that making it public will be the only way that I can force myself to update it regularly. I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil, and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? It seems to have everything it needs (a wiki and a ticketing system) for self-hosting, and I have my own domain that I have not activated yet, so maybe I should just use fossil and host it myself. Any comments? There is no test suite (shock, horror). I have not got my head around that yet. The things that I could write tests for are so trivial that they don't seem worth the effort, and the things that cause me problems are so complex, because they depend on exactly what features have been activated, that the permutations are endless and I don't know where to start. However, once it is public, if someone is prepared to do a bit of mentoring, I will start to fill the gap. Documentation is a mess. I did start using Sphinx a while ago, so there is a sprinkling of rest-format docstrings, but they have not been kept up-to-date, and in some cases are out of date. There are plenty of other comments in the code, mostly reminders to myself about various issues. I don't know open-source etiquette. Should I spend the time to sort this out before going public, or is it acceptable to leave it as is for now? Any other comments? Frank Millman -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Frank Millman fr...@chagford.com wrote: This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. I have had two attempts at running an hg repository locally, and I am afraid that I am not keeping it up to date. I do have a master copy, but I have made so many changes in my clone that a merge will not make any sense, so I will have to start afresh. I think that making it public will be the only way that I can force myself to update it regularly. Then you need to develop a new style of working, which plays more nicely with source control. Instead of hacking on whatever you feel like doing and then committing to source control later, make each change and immediately commit it. Get into the habit of putting useful commit messages onto your changes. As you say, making it public will help you force yourself to keep that up-to-date. I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil, and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? It seems to have everything it needs (a wiki and a ticketing system) for self-hosting, and I have my own domain that I have not activated yet, so maybe I should just use fossil and host it myself. Any comments? I haven't used fossil personally, but I'm not really a fan of all-in-one systems; they're somewhat inflexible. If you don't like the wiki, you're stuck with it. I'd rather work with all the parts separately - change one and it doesn't affect anything else. But if all fossil's parts suit you, then by all means, use it! Documentation is a mess. I did start using Sphinx a while ago, so there is a sprinkling of rest-format docstrings, but they have not been kept up-to-date, and in some cases are out of date. There are plenty of other comments in the code, mostly reminders to myself about various issues. I don't know open-source etiquette. Should I spend the time to sort this out before going public, or is it acceptable to leave it as is for now? Go public first, and watch what people get confused at - then document those parts. If you try to document everything first, you'll spend heaps of time and effort on it, and maybe won't even be happy with the result. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
On 8/27/14 3:50 AM, Frank Millman wrote: Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com wrote in message news:calwzidkro_hryamwxbk0go-w1oj6ty6myb_c5vhxb6okgol...@mail.gmail.com... Ugh. There seems to be no public repository, and the only source to be found is from release-versioned tarballs, so there's apparently no collaboration other than some forums for reporting bugs and requesting features. All the work is done by one developer in his spare time, and he is currently on hiatus since April. Meanwhile the most recent release is February, so it's not like somebody could just pick it up and start hacking and expect to merge. That's only open-source under the most literal of definitions. This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. I have had two attempts at running an hg repository locally, and I am afraid that I am not keeping it up to date. I do have a master copy, but I have made so many changes in my clone that a merge will not make any sense, so I will have to start afresh. I think that making it public will be the only way that I can force myself to update it regularly. You don't need a local hg repo, you just need a working tree. I recommend choosing either hg or git, and then using BitBucket or Github, and being done with it. I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil, and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? It seems to have everything it needs (a wiki and a ticketing system) for self-hosting, and I have my own domain that I have not activated yet, so maybe I should just use fossil and host it myself. Any comments? Fossil is one of those technologies that is very attractive in and of itself, but is so under-adopted that it will itself be a barrier to collaboration. (Frankly, hg is getting to that category also.) There is no test suite (shock, horror). I have not got my head around that yet. The things that I could write tests for are so trivial that they don't seem worth the effort, and the things that cause me problems are so complex, because they depend on exactly what features have been activated, that the permutations are endless and I don't know where to start. However, once it is public, if someone is prepared to do a bit of mentoring, I will start to fill the gap. Documentation is a mess. I did start using Sphinx a while ago, so there is a sprinkling of rest-format docstrings, but they have not been kept up-to-date, and in some cases are out of date. There are plenty of other comments in the code, mostly reminders to myself about various issues. I don't know open-source etiquette. Should I spend the time to sort this out before going public, or is it acceptable to leave it as is for now? Go public first. People might look at your repo and say, ugh, this is a mess, I'm not going to help here, but the alternative is them saying, there is no public repo, and therefore no project, ... Any other comments? Frank Millman -- Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
On Wednesday, August 27, 2014 5:24:40 PM UTC+5:30, Ned Batchelder wrote: On 8/27/14 3:50 AM, Frank Millman wrote: Ian Kelly wrote in message Ugh. There seems to be no public repository, and the only source to be found is from release-versioned tarballs, so there's apparently no collaboration other than some forums for reporting bugs and requesting features. All the work is done by one developer in his spare time, and he is currently on hiatus since April. Meanwhile the most recent release is February, so it's not like somebody could just pick it up and start hacking and expect to merge. That's only open-source under the most literal of definitions. This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. I have had two attempts at running an hg repository locally, and I am afraid that I am not keeping it up to date. I do have a master copy, but I have made so many changes in my clone that a merge will not make any sense, so I will have to start afresh. I think that making it public will be the only way that I can force myself to update it regularly. You don't need a local hg repo, you just need a working tree. I recommend choosing either hg or git, and then using BitBucket or Github, and being done with it. I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil, and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? It seems to have everything it needs (a wiki and a ticketing system) for self-hosting, and I have my own domain that I have not activated yet, so maybe I should just use fossil and host it myself. Any comments? Fossil is one of those technologies that is very attractive in and of itself, but is so under-adopted that it will itself be a barrier to collaboration. (Frankly, hg is getting to that category also.) Some plainspeak -- Nice! In modern society we are part users, part masters. It may be 99% user 1% master if one is super-intelligent versatile etc -- renaissance men. For us more ordinary folk it is more like 99.99% vs 0.01% Eg I dont know how to repair the car I drive, build the roads they run on, a frigging clue about the intenals of the utilities (electricity/water...) I consume etc. Heck this is even true of computers -- the SMPS? the Disk? Likewise versioning systems. We need to use them. We dont need to master all the details and possibilities. Git has won the battle -- maybe because of the mystique around the name 'Torvalds', maybe for sound technical reasons. It doesn't matter. If you have better things in your life than becoming a phd in versioning, I'd say flow with the tide and switch to git -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
hg, git, fossil, ... [was Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]]
On 08/27/2014 10:29 AM, Rustom Mody wrote: Git has won the battle Good thing there's room for more than one technology. I use hg because 1) python-dev uses hg; and 2) I understand the simple hg commands. I find git confusing, and my main uses are commit, pull, update, an occasional merge, and a rare rollback -- not complicated stuff. -- ~Ethan~ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: hg, git, fossil, ... [was Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]]
On 08/27/2014 11:51 AM, Skip Montanaro wrote: Thank God for StackOverflow. :-) +1 QotW -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: hg, git, fossil, ... [was Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]]
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Ethan Furman et...@stoneleaf.us wrote: I use hg because 1) python-dev uses hg; and 2) I understand the simple hg commands. I find git confusing, and my main uses are commit, pull, update, an occasional merge, and a rare rollback -- not complicated stuff. The simple hg commands are generally not all that different (in my limited experience) than the simple git commands, for some definition of simple. Stuff like clone, init, push, pull, commit, the small number of commands you use day in, day out. When you get beyond that simple core, both are confusing to me. I think it all boils down to what you use most often. At work they settled on git awhile ago, so I'm now comfortable with the basics there, though I recently had a rather unpleasant first experience with git rebase. Both hg (almost all of it for me) and git (the stuff I don't regularly use) are like Perl: I need to consult the documentation every step of the way. Thank God for StackOverflow. :-) Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]
Am 27.08.14 09:50, schrieb Frank Millman: This is quite a timely message for me. I am inching closer to releasing a version of my accounting software, and a lot of the above comments apply to me as well. At present I am the only developer, and my project is not hosted anywhere, so I have to decide how to make it available, and I am open to suggestions. [...] I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil, and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? It seems to have everything it needs (a wiki and a ticketing system) for self-hosting, and I have my own domain that I have not activated yet, so maybe I should just use fossil and host it myself. Any comments? Fossil is indeed an impressive piece. It comes from Richard Hipp, the guy behind SQLite, and it's currently in use to manage the Tcl/Tk sources. If you want to do the hosting yourself, it can be a good choice. I myself decided not to use it, but instead use git with github. The reasons: - github offers much more than plain git; you can host a website in the repo, included is a (rudimentary) templating engine, which allows to write your docs in simple markdown [*] - the github frontpage makes it easier to download a tarball of the project. In the fossil website it's quite hard to find - github gives the server storage for free to open source projects - there is a social network - anybody who wants to contribute, can send you pull requests via github - For large projects, git is much faster than fossil to update the repo. The good news: you can migrate from fossil to git; e.g. the tcl/tk repos are mirrored to github. For fossil, there is also public storage space e.g. on chiselapp.com as an alternative Christian [*] in case you are curious, this is the website of my repo: http://auriocus.github.io/VecTcl/ The content is all done in markdown, including math and syntax highlighting, and the template was adopted from one of the designs offered from github -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: hg, git, fossil, ... [was Re: What is acceptable as 'open-source'? [was Python vs C++]]
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 4:51 AM, Skip Montanaro s...@pobox.com wrote: The simple hg commands are generally not all that different (in my limited experience) than the simple git commands, for some definition of simple. Stuff like clone, init, push, pull, commit, the small number of commands you use day in, day out. When you get beyond that simple core, both are confusing to me. I think it all boils down to what you use most often. At work they settled on git awhile ago, so I'm now comfortable with the basics there, though I recently had a rather unpleasant first experience with git rebase. Both hg (almost all of it for me) and git (the stuff I don't regularly use) are like Perl: I need to consult the documentation every step of the way. Thank God for StackOverflow. :-) +1. And most importantly: Use source control even though you don't understand all the ins and outs of the one you're using, because you can always get help when something goes wrong. I got my family (mostly non-technical people, or technical people from decades ago - my dad's been in computing since before I was born, but he doesn't know most of the modern tools) to use a git repo instead of a shared directory, basically by giving them very clear and simple instructions: git pull --rebase to see other people's changes, git add when you create a new file, git commit -a to record your changes, git push to send the changes to the central server. (Yes, I know git doesn't need a central server. It's still much simpler to describe it all that way.) If anything goes wrong, they call me for help. They don't need to understand about the myriad ways to call on git log, they don't need to worry about bisecting, they don't even need to branch/merge... and git happily runs for them, every single day. The simple hg/git commands will get you through a pretty huge amount of coding. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
