Changelists

One of the reasons people like Perforce's P4 is that it has changelists. You can add some files to a changelist, and other files to another changelist, then check in one changelist when you are ready, and not the other.

Now, in Subversion 1.5, you can do the same thing.

Have you seen a situation where Subversion needs to be accessible on a couple of different continents? Checkout of a few files, or an update with no changes, takes at least several seconds, call it 10, when your server is on the other continent. The following notes in the Release Notes show that this may be fixable now.

From the Subversion 1.5 Release Notes:

I have worked on build systems at 4 companies. Some were branched, some were not. Some had web inerfaces, some were command-line only, some were cron-only.

A build system looks different than other software. It "only" has to build your software. Once it's "done", it looks like it won't change.

Yeah, right.

I use a wiki to record procedures, processes, configuration information, and other info I need to track in working with build systems and databases. I think my use is typical of any IT department or software development department. Of the two most popular wikis in corporate environments, I prefer TWiki to Mediawiki (of Wikipedia fame) because of its "breadcrumb trails". Let's look first at more basic needs in a wiki.

There are a lot of people out there who would like to do code review at their company, but there is no time for the meetings. Now there are several software products that allow you to do the code review without the meetings.

Codestriker is a a free open source product, that allows you to ask reviewers to look at your code. You upload a diff file to a web page and list who you want to do the review, and optionally what Bugzilla bugID is relevant. They reply by web forms. You resolve the bug, or not, in the code review. The result is posted to the Bugzilla bug.

The Bugzilla project has recently discussed whether to continue writing Bugzilla in Perl. As far as I can tell, they are not likely to abandon Perl, but there was discussion about what language would be best.

I am mentioning this because Build Systems have some of the same characteristics as Bugzilla: