Slashdot Mirror

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Try the Perforce configuration management system.

I have no personal experience, but have been told it's quite good. For example, all database operations are atomic - compare this with Microsoft's KB recommendation that you "never let SourceSafe run out of disk space" because it will corrupt the database.

Tim

Try the Perforce configuration management system.

I have no personal experience, but have been told it's quite good. For example, all database operations are atomic - compare this with Microsoft's KB recommendation that you "never let SourceSafe run out of disk space" because it will corrupt the database.

Tim

Clearcase is pretty good and Visual Source Safe works well on Win32. I think CVS is superior because it is more cross platform and *flexible* about what you can do with it. I like being able to migrate development over various platforms because you never know when Win32 will suddenly cease to be viable or Linux will pale next to Solaris for some high-performance server side code [hey, it could happen]...

And if you want something superior to CVS, but without the financial hemmorage that is ClearCase, get Perforce

I have used both systems, so I'll comment on my experiences. I haven't administered a CVS repository, so some of my knowledge will be incomplete there.

The migration process question is easy to answer: when you migrate, you're gonna lose all your history. So when you do, I recommend you burn a CD with your VSS repository on it and archive it on a server somewhere. Then, do a complete checkout of your source tree into a fresh location. From there, do a massive add to your CVS repository and boom, you've got your source migrated over. One thing you may want to do is write a script that will insert an $Id:$ tag in a comment up at the top of each of your source files before they get added; I find it awfully nice to have the revision number right there so that when somebody asks me what version I'm working on, I can tell 'em.

On the differences, an exhaustive list would be really long. You might take a look at the FAQ for comp.software.config-mgmt as a starting point. In brief, though, CVS has these advantages over VSS:

• The repository doesn't automatically get corrupted by usage. (VSS does this.)
• Checking in and out don't get exponentially slower as the repository gets big.
• There are clients for just about any development platform -- so your Mac HTML/Graphics people don't have to have CodeWarrior and the VSS plugin in order to check in their work.
• It's free

Actually, if you can afford the package, I'd suggest looking into Perforce. It's very similar to CVS (including the variety of platforms for which it has clients - although the Mac client is an MPW tool, which is great for programmers but icky for designer types), and it introduces a couple of very nice features: atomic changes (so when you check in a bunch of files, the commit doesn't happen until they're all in) and a really slick use of the filesystem so that with really huge repositories it's still lightning fast.

Atria Software, "Building Software Systems with ClearMake", ClearCase Users Manual, Natick MA, May 1994.

Geoffrey M. Clemm, The Odin Reference Manual, available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.colorado.edu.

S. I. Feldman, "Make - A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs", BSD NET2 documentation, April 1986 (revision).

Glenn Fowler, "The Fourth Generation Make", Proceedings of the USENIX Summer Conference, June 1985.

Peter Miller, "Cook - A File Construction Tool", Volume 26, comp.sources.unix archives, 1993.

Christopher Seiwald, "Jam -- Make(1) Redux", Usenix UNIX Applications Development Symposium, Toronto, Canada April 1994.

Richard M. Stallman and Roland McGrath, "GNU Make - A Program for Directed Recompilation", Free Software Foundation, 1991.

Zoltan Somogyi, "Cake, a Fifth Generation Version of Make", Australian Unix System User Group Newsletter, April 1987.

Dennis Vadura, dmake(1) manual page, Volume 27, comp.sources.misc archives, 1990.

Which show some different approaches that have been taken, even though some of them don't qualify or are what are the things being replaced.

If there's a missing requirement in the rules of the contest, it's the lack of a migration path from make. Without that, you just have an interesting toy, because no one will move their existing significant system without it.

-dB

However, for applications that are either closed-source (and thus binary only), or those which are open source, but have complex library and other environmental issues (such as something like KDE or Gnat -- the GNU Ada compiler), I hope that the makers of such software will take the time to put out a BSD version. I just don't see any reason that they shouldn't.

Because, for the commercial software, it's Another Platform To Support, and they have to build it for the platform, test it on the platform, take support calls for the platform, etc.?

Some vendors do have FreeBSD ports - Applix and Perforce, for example. Linux binaries of commercial products may run on FreeBSD, as well - I seem to remember Jordan Hubbard suggesting to vendors that they port to Linux first.

As for the open-source applications, well, check out the BSD ports collection - my desktop is KDE 1.1.2, from the FreeBSD ports collection....

You are right and you are wrong. Most software spends most of its time being modified to meet new requirements. That doesn't meen that you don't need a good understanding of those requirements, especially when you have more than one or two people working on a project and need them to pull together. I advocate evolutionary delivery of software based on exactly this. See my paper, Product Quality through Change Management presented at the 1999 Perforce user conference.

``I don't see a Code Warrior for xBSD''. I don't see a Code Warrior for Debian, or SuSE, or Caldera, or SlackWare, or Turbo, or any other Linux-based operating systems either. I do happen to have a beta of Code Warrior for Solaris at work, and like Code Warrior for RedHat, it's not terribly impressive. It's a half-baked editor with a cheesy binary project file build system wrapped around the same GNU compiler you can download for free from Cygnus. I'll stick with Emacs, thank you. If you want to look at an innovative approach to building complicated systems, see Jam/MR from Perforce Software. It's available under a free license and runs on Linux, xBSD, and just about anything else. Before you jump to point out that CodeWarrior for RedHat will run on Debian, or SuSE, or whatever, let me assure you it will run on FreeBSD as well.

``Linux is not xBSD on training wheels. It's an alternative, original implementation of classic UNIX concepts.'' Yup, you're exactly right. What my article points out is that Linux and xBSD are very closely related, both by the direct cross-pollination between the development groups and by the amount of shared code they use. Both Greg Lehey and I have written before about the difference in focus between FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, and I was showing our mostly BSD-based readership that Linux is very similar. In point of fact, it is probably the most like NetBSD, due to the portability of the Linux kernel, but is fairly close to FreeBSD as well, since much of the focus remains on the PC architecture. In addition to that, it has additional focuses, such as embracing a wide range of hardware, that differentiate it from all of the BSDs.

I suggested Linux is the best starting place for those who don't already know UNIX not because Linux is some goofball stripped down system with ``training wheels'', but rather because the developers of Linux have done such a good job of making it run and run well on just about anything. The developers of Linux also really care about those guys with the $29 tape drive, because they were all ``some guy with a $29 tape drive'' once themselves.

So, let's stop reading all your Linux snobbery into my article and take it at face value. When I say developing a device driver for a $29 tape drive doesn't mean the developer is wasting his time, that is exactly what I mean. I phrased it the way I did because that was the next natural question for the Horshacks in the audience to raise: ``Oooh! Oooh! Mr. Kotter! Doesn't that mean the developer is like wasting his time?'' ``No, Arnold, it means he has a working tape drive and you do too.''

Class dismissed.

ClearCase is basically the big all-encompassing approach to source-code control. It is not a very good product, IMO.

If you want something fast & small, take a look at Perforce. They have a very interesting comparison between their product and ClearCase here. And they've been supporting Linux, FreeBSD, & BeOS (amongst others) from the start.

I am not an employee of Perforce, but I work for one of their bigger customers. Switching to perforce was one of the best things we ever did.

What I'd really like to see from Rational is a port of Purify! That's the most useful piece of software they produce.

ClearCase is basically the big all-encompassing approach to source-code control. It is not a very good product, IMO.

If you want something fast & small, take a look at Perforce. They have a very interesting comparison between their product and ClearCase here. And they've been supporting Linux, FreeBSD, & BeOS (amongst others) from the start.

I am not an employee of Perforce, but I work for one of their bigger customers. Switching to perforce was one of the best things we ever did.

What I'd really like to see from Rational is a port of Purify! That's the most useful piece of software they produce.