Month: July 2008

Looking for a job

On September I finish my studies of computer science, so I start to search a job. I really enjoyed my current job at Collabora maintaining Empathy, I learned lots of things about the Free Software world and I would like to keep working on free software related projects if possible. My CV is available online here.

Do you guys know any company around the free software and GNOME looking for new employees? You can contact me by email to xclaesse@gmail.com

Back from Istanbul

 I’m back home. Istanbul was my 2nd guadec and it was really great. I meet lots of interesting people and we had a chance to discuss a bit about the future of Empathy with guys from the People and Soylent project

VCS was a big topic this year. Basicly it seems was can resume it to “svn VS git VS bzr”. I heard nobody speaking about any other VCS. My opinion as maintainer of Empathy on GNOME server:

  • CVS is almost equal to SVN, I’ve  seen no big change of my workflow. In both cases I assume branch is not possible. I know there is lots of scripts and stuff to make branch work a bit… but really, svn DON’T support branches AT ALL compared to git.
  • I’m using git-svn to keep git://git.collabora.co.uk/git/empathy.git in sync with SVN, that’s a pain.
  • All Empathy contributers are using git, only translators still use svn. Keeping svn only for translators (~3 commits per month in Empathy) is stupid. It will lead to some GNOME maintainers to just stop using SVN and move to their favourite system and we won’t have a central place to get GNOME code anymore. That will happen for sure if we don’t do something asap.
  • I have nothing against other DVCS like bzr, I’ve just never tryed them… I’m sure I can be happy with them just like I am with git. So I won’t complain if GNOME moves from svn to any other system, IMO svn is the worst of them all so it can only be an improvement.
  • Please stop speaking of “learning curve”, that makes no sence at all. A new contributor does “svn co <url> && edit files && svn diff > stuff.patch && attach to bugzilla”, using git that translates to “git clone <url> && edit files && git diff  > stuff.patch && attach to bugzilla”. You see, no change! Git is able to make more complex jobs but new contributors don’t need to know them.
  • Whatever to new system will be lots of developers won’t agree, so I think web admins should do just like the release team at guadec: “Here is the plan, and there is no question”. Sometimes there is no otherway to make things going forward. Btw, if the plan is to keep svn I would be really sad, but please announce “We are keeping svn at least until GNOME 3.0 OR $x years OR forever” so we can stop flames.

So far the only good argue I’ve heard against git is portability on Windows and difficulties to port the svn archive to git. I would like to know if that’s still true that git is impossible to run on windows (if it’s just difficult it doesn’t matter, windows is hard itself)? Does bzr make a better job on windows? Is it really difficult to translate an svn repository like gnome to git/bzr?

I really hope that issue will be fixed soon!