Geek Style

While I run Windows XP on my laptop, my friends know that I am a big big fan and advocate of FreeBSD, Sun Solaris and Apple Mac OS X. Keep these facts.

Beside my faith and believe in Sun, now I am afraid they are going the wrong way. In fact, Sun without Bill Joy is like Apple without Steve Jobs. People in sun are officially starting to act weird:

As you know, we recently unveiled Solaris 10, the world’s highest volume and most secure UNIX, running on all volume platforms - SPARC and both AMD and Intel x64. We’ve seen a huge rush of downloads (topping 1.5 million licenses) - and as you continue exploring the x64 platform as an alternative for your users, the opportunity to join forces on an operating system seems readily at hand.

So I’d like to personally invite you to adopt Solaris 10 as the underpinning of the next generation Mac. We both respect Unix, both respect innovation, and both clearly see volume opportunities in extending choice to developers. We’d love to work together.

from Jonathan Schwartz blog

I am afraid he’s not sure what he is talking about. Solaris is not mature enough for serious jobs on x86. And what would motivate apple to discard its own BSD-like licensed platform (which because of derivation from FreeBSD project, is already mature and stable on x86 platform) and switch to Solaris?

Maybe it was a free try to promote Solaris. But instead of chattering and issuing free advise to people, I’d suggest them to work on better products and realize the promises they’ve made about ZFS and their other unfinished projects.

Now that everyone has started loving subversion for version control needs, I guess it has a long way to go. If you are thinking of switching to subversion, I’d urge you to think twice.

1- To support transport over http protocol, only Apache version 2 is supported. Many system administrators prefer to stick with apache 1.3 that tends to be more robust and very will supported. This it the first major downfall for subversion.

2- Even by running Apache2, you’ll face serious permissions problem. Subversion has a very nifty interface using APR and DAV module, but even experienced sysadmins will have a serious challenge with permissions on svn repositories.

3- “svnserve” that supposed to handle svn:// protocol is also not a well supported application. Reading docs you are somehow recommended to use http protocol. Setting it up is a painful process.

If you are going for subversion, you may also would like to check out trac, the “an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects”.

However I’d prefer to stay with cvs for the moment.