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CVS done right.

I have seen a couple of Java based Unified Modeling Language tools but no Python support or implementation. It would seem natural to develop in python based on UML, so this must be a large gap in the python suite. What do you think of designing with UML and implementing in python?

Thorn is an opensource UML editor written in Java with JPython scripting but no python code generation.

ArgoUML is an opensource UML editor written in Java with no current python code generation

Well, several open-source projects that I have seen have set up CVS hooks, to send email to a cvs mailing list whenever something is committed. Then at least some people subscribed to the CVS list review the code. As for patches sent in by non-committers, obviously whoever eventually commits the patch reviews it, then the same thing happens, and the list reviews it. All in all I have seen it work quite well on both the Apache Portable Runtime and Subversion projects.
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We've been considering both Visual Source Safe (which we've had good luck with, but find it feature-poor) and CVS. I'd love any feedback anyone has comparing the two on a fairly large project, particularily where we have two sets of developers working off-site through slow IP links.

PVCS was appallingly bad. Random corruption, files perpetually locked by others. RCS was feature-poor. CMS was actually pretty good, especially if you didn't want to branch anything. I used to like CVS.

Then I landed in a shop where they use Perforce, and grumbled for a while that it wasn't CVS. Pretty quickly I was a convert. Perforce is like CVS except that:

• branching is understandable
• the commands and options are regular and systematic, so it's possible to remember what they all do
• it has lots of reporting commands, so you don't have to maintain a ChangeLog by hand

Then I discovered how much fun scripting it was!

There's tension in that it's not free software, but then Perforce the software and Perforce the company are a joy to deal with, so you don't begrudge them all that much. Their user base is largely a free software-like rabid bunch of happy advocates, so something must be right.

I'm looking forward to next week's SVLUG talk about Subversion, which might be Perforce's first real competition for a while in the "it's not ClearCase -- thank God" category.

Over the slow IP links: by all accounts, Source Safe is terrible. On our large projects worked on from half a dozen sites, Perforce works well. The GCC folks can probably tell you how well CVS works in that situation: I suspect the answer is pretty reasonably well too.

It looks like nobody else has done this yet: CVS is wonderful, but has many quirks and limitations that the developers won't fix. Fortunately, there is a project for a next-generation CVS-like system called SVN (a.k.a. "Subversion") here. That has to be worth a +3 Informative, at least.

Actually, CVS clients send the entire file contents when committing. It is only updates that send a diff. This is because the CVS metadata doesn't store what your copy looked like before you changed it. Wait for Subversion(M2 expected RSN (1 April 2001)), for a system that will send diffs both directions, as well as a whole lot more.
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The Scarab project is a fairly interesting effort to create a good bug tracker. This is from a group who used Bugzilla as a tool, so i think they saw the opportunity to observe what that did right and wrong.
I've used Bugzilla a lot, and it's OK, but it is far from perfect. It started out as a very ad-hoc tool, and has evolved organically from there (and it shows). I wouldn't use it by preference, but I don't see a lot of other alternatives (other than Scarab, which I'd evaluate first).

Here's another open-source community link that might be of interest.

It appears Subversion would like to be a CVS replacement, development looks active.

Brian

The tigris project seems to be another one. They host some projects, but I think their emphasis is on development of oss development tools.

"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."

It supports UML class diagrams, export to gifs (nice for publishing your designs on the project web page), code generation, todo-lists and some experimental cognitive stuff that analyzes your design decisions and provide feedback on your choices. I don't trust the AI stuff too much (if a machine is better at object-oriented design than I am, then for how long will I have a job?) but the rest is useful.

Check it out at argouml.org.

They also recently joined the Tigris team which seem to produce some other nice tools, but I haven't looked into them.