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Apache considered harmful

mikealrogers.com

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Re: Apache considered harmful

#101

Post by luriel »

This might be slightly offtopic, but might be a symptom of the "institutional"/"organizational" issues addressed in the article:

I always thought Apache 2 and Subversion were two of the best examples of second-system effect. I mentioned this once to one of the core Apache (and Svn) developers years ago, and not only was he blissfully unaware of the effect, he indicated that he had helped build incredibly successful pieces of software (ie., Apache 1.x) and didn't need any advice from from Fred Brooks or anyone on how to do it.

Both Apache 2 and svn have been extremely successful projects, but both were late, didn't really match expectations or even the success of their predecessors, and are slowly being outcompeted by much smaller and usually more efficient projects (eg., nginx, lighttpd, git, hg) that are developed much more quickly by much smaller teams.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#102

Post by jimbobimbo »

kahawe wrote: post #83
jaaron wrote: post #15

Ok, there's a lot to cover here. First off, the Apache Software Foundation isn't trying to absorb anyone or anything. Projects and people come to the ASF. It's a specific policy of the Foundation to NOT solicit projects. If someone says they're representing Apache and soliciting projects, they're wrong. Secondly, Apache is very opinionated about how projects should be run. This comes from years of experience as not o…

Spot on, excellent points and I could not help but wonder about the article... most people would consider "apache" to be synonymous for the httpd and not the ASF, so the headline is clearly fishing. Then, OP argues ASF's processes are broken and a github project with one maintainer is so much easier... you really have to consider the scale of the average sourceforge (back in the day) project vs. apache even back then…

Spot on the "coping" with update/commit cycle - I have exact same problem in my team.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#104

Post by RyanMcGreal »

fuzzix wrote: post #100
kahawe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sorry to tell you, but you are plain wrong! Git is better. Please, do elaborate! In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access. No distributed or remote or on-the-go development, no forks. > SVN embraces a workflow that is inferior. It is different but what exactly make…

"Please, do elaborate! In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access. No distributed or remote or on-the-go development, no forks" You describe my environment almost exactly. I am pushing for a git migration mostly for the low-overhead branching/merging as I can have multiple…

Don't forget speed. Git is fast.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#105

Post by buff-a »

exDM69 wrote: post #89
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not totally familiar with the issues here, but from an earlier perusal of the email threads on this, it seems like ASF's concern involves things like git's ability to edit the repository history.

tl;dr: Sign your Git commits cryptographically with PGP if you don't want the history to be editable. Git's ability to edit the history is a very useful tool. I don't think Subversion or any other VCS prevents you from editing the history either. Maybe they just don't provide tools for that so you'd have to hack the internal data structures of the VCS or something, but you actually want a tool to modify the history.…

Discussion on this subject with a reply from Linus:

http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/GPG-signing-for-git-commit-t...

Re: Apache considered harmful

#106

Post by suprgeek »

Some people at the ASF think that Git may have some issues so are not wholeheartedly endorsing it for any and all projects.

Somehow this gets translated into "Apache considered harmful".

Why is this even on the front page?

Re: Apache considered harmful

#108

Post by yummyfajitas »

kahawe wrote: post #98
ma2rten wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry to tell you, but you are plain wrong! Git is better. The problem is that SVN embraces a workflow that is inferior. But if you are not willing to change your workflow, git will seem confusing, indeed.

> I am sorry to tell you, but you are plain wrong! Git is better. Please, do elaborate! In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access. No distributed or remote or on-the-go development, no forks. > SVN embraces a workflow that is inferior. It is different but what exactly make…

In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access.

I was in exactly this situation at my last job (minus the same room, I was stuck in a separate office). In spite of the main source repo being SVN, we all used git-svn as our client.

The main benefit is that git makes it easier to create clean commits and push them to trunk.

E.g., I want to make module Foo, and use it in Bar. I can use git as I go, building module Foo incrementally over 5 commits (none of which has sufficient quality to go into trunk). Then I can do 5 more commits which integrate Foo into Bar. So my individual history is tracked while I'm developing. If, while building Bar, I make a bugfix to foo, I can commit it.

So logically, my commits look like:

101-104 Work on Foo

105-107 Work on Bar 108 Bug fix on Foo 109-111 Finish work on Bar

When it comes time to push to trunk, I can rebase 101-104 + 108 into one clean patch, "Built module foo", and 105-107 + 109-111 into "Incorporate module foo into bar". Then I eventually push these into the main repo.

Further, if I'm working on this with someone else, we can use git to track work between the two of us without committing to mainline.

Re: Apache considered harmful

#109

Post by [deleted] »

fuzzix wrote: post #100
kahawe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sorry to tell you, but you are plain wrong! Git is better. Please, do elaborate! In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access. No distributed or remote or on-the-go development, no forks. > SVN embraces a workflow that is inferior. It is different but what exactly make…

"Please, do elaborate! In detail, why is git better than subversion if all I need is a central repository for a few people working at a company on one site, sitting in the same room with permanent network access. No distributed or remote or on-the-go development, no forks" You describe my environment almost exactly. I am pushing for a git migration mostly for the low-overhead branching/merging as I can have multiple…

[deleted]

Re: Apache considered harmful

#110

Post by kahawe »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #102
kahawe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on, excellent points and I could not help but wonder about the article... most people would consider "apache" to be synonymous for the httpd and not the ASF, so the headline is clearly fishing. Then, OP argues ASF's processes are broken and a github project with one maintainer is so much easier... you really have to consider the scale of the average sourceforge (back in the day) project vs. apache even back then…

Spot on the "coping" with update/commit cycle - I have exact same problem in my team.

You have my full sympathy... we are doomed :(
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