The Open Source U

Fossil SCM

When I had really discovered DVCS a while back, I didn’t really notice fossil and for that I’m sorry.

I think it is a (for my purposes) viable DVCS in which I’d given consideration before diving in to use Mercurial (although it is a great system and I’ve had no issues with it). Some of the features of fossil are appealing, such as having the bug tracker integrated or the help wiki integration. Obviously this won’t work for all projects, but I think it has potential.

What is particularly interesting is that the site at fossil-scm.org is actually fossil serving itself. Consider the URL when you visit the home page: “http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki”  It’s a wiki page. If you click on a few of the links in the link-bar, I think you’ll see what I mean. The site is it’s repository — or rather the repository contains the site. While this is arguably a good and bad thing, I can find it’s appeal. It’s certainly a new step (for me) in the management of a project.

While I certainly would never migrate all my Mercurial repositories to fossil for the time being, I am strongly considering using fossil for a class project I’ll be completing for SE-450. If for nothing else but to learn more about fossil and to gain insights in to it’s use as it compares to Mercurial. Fossil is suited to some things and Mercurial is suited to some things. Perhaps it’s time to actively use two different VCS depending on my project needs…

More inf o at: http://www.fossil-scm.org/

I’ve recently been coming across the term “smells” or “code smells.” Once you see it in context, it’s quite clear what it means. Something bad to fix. Java.net posted a list of such smells as well as a suggested method to correct it.  Reference lists like this can be helpful. Even if you are not actively studying things like this, it’s good to review to gain a broad view of what types of things should be avoided.

http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/People/SmellsToRefactorings

This link was given to me by my instructor for a Object-Orientated Software Development class. Again, worth while to review.

I just realized that the 9th was this site’s birthday. This blog is now over one year old! Wow.

Most blogs only last one month! So this is exciting for me indeed. Although slow, the site isn’t dead.

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) [...]

Source: http://www.caslon.com.au/weblogprofile1.htm#ephemerality

I wanted to post a bit of a status update. There hasn’t been any new writing on this site for a while and I want to apologize about that — especially since I stopped right in the middle of my Firefox research.

I do intend to continue the pursuit; however, it has taken a backseat to my Graduate studies for the time being. I don’t want to go in to too much detail, but this term I’ve enrolled in two classes instead of just one.

Hang on to the RSS feed, I’ll be back to it shortly.