

Looking Deeper into Forges, And Not Liking What I See - esr - billswift
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1295#more-1295

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camccann
Bah, why is he just complaining? A true open-source hacker would charge
blindly forward and implement something that duplicates functionality of
existing projects but with a different (and unique) set of deficiencies and
bugs, is subtly incompatible with everything else, and that either will never
be used by anyone or will fragment the user base resulting in long religious
wars between users and another talking point for the "open source is bad
because it has _too many choices_ " crowd.

(Disclaimer: firmly tongue in cheek, I'm a long-term and very happy desktop
Linux user--though seriously, how many open source DVCS projects are there by
now?)

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shpxnvz
Actually, he says that he may work on refactoring an existing forge project to
add the features he deems necessary to free it's users from the "data jail."

No idea if that will really happen, but if so it's a tad better than the
normal complain-but-do-nothing approach it's so common to find.

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tptacek
_They couldn’t have done it without either (a) duplicating a significant
number of SQL queries in some kind of ad-hoc tool (begging for maintenance
problems as the SQL schema changed) or (b) prying the SQL queries loose from
the GUI and isolating them in some kind of service broker, either an Apache
plugin or a service daemon, that both the web interface and a scripting tool
could call on._

An "Apache plugin or service daemon"? It may just be me, but he sounds like a
crazy person here. Oh, wait.

~~~
igowen
It's like he has never heard of MVC.

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JulianMorrison
It's like you haven't noticed he is trying to break data _out_ of the web
jail. MVC is an in-process architecture. Evidently, he's thinking about an
inter-process architecture that could be fronted in multiple ways.

~~~
tptacek
There is nothing "in-process" about MVC. I can access ActiveRecord objects
just as easily from an IRB as from a Rails action, and I can drive a REST API
just fine from curl. He's simply crazy.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Your inter-process service broker is called "MySQL".

This may not be the best architecture.

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billswift
This is a followup to "Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting
Sites", <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1282> .

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uriel
Really, is it so hard to roll your own?

I did, and it was trivial: <http://repo.cat-v.org>

~~~
shpxnvz
I must just be missing it, but does yours implement mailing lists, issue
tracker, a scriptable release process, _and_ have the entire project history
including lists and issues easily accessible as downloadable snapshots?

If not, then it seems to be more an example of what he's railing against
rather than a trivial solution to his perceived problem.

