Last week I set up LDAP as a central authentication/identity store for the Toronto Hacklab. I thought I’d share my notes. It went well enough that I’m going to repeat the process with the Grimoire: right now each part of the site (WordPress, WebDAV for various repositories, JIRA, and Hudson) handles its own authentication, and it’s gotten unmanageable.
Yes, there is only one user. Yes, I still think it’s worthwhile.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever put a // TODO comment in your source code. Or // FIXME, // XXX, or any of the thousands of other variants programmers have been using since before there was dirt to mark places that need further work.
Now raise your hand if your compiler or build tool can tell you about them.
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GNU Make is a relatively modern version of one of the oldest build tools still in regular use. Make has existed since 1977 and is still the standard tool for building native software in Unix-derived environment. The pattern Make established, based on using a directed graph to automate builds, is still in use in more recent tools.
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Recently, a project I’m working on set out to reinvent their build process, migrating from a mass of poorly-written Ant scripts to Maven and reorganizing their source tree in the process. The development process is based on having a branch per client, so there is a lot of ongoing development on the original layout for clients that haven’t been migrated yet. We discovered that our version control tool, Subversion, is unable to merge the changes between client branches on the old structure and the trunk on the new structure automatically.
Curiousity piqued, I cooked up a script that reproduces the problem and performs the merge from various directions to examine the results. Subversion, sadly, performed dismally: none of the merge scenarios tested retained content changes when merging structural changes to the same files.
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Every software system, from simple Python packages to huge enterprise-grade systems spanning massive clusters, has a build—a set of steps that must be followed to go from a source tree or a checked-out project to a ready-to-use build product. A build system’s job is to automate these steps.
Build systems are critical to software development.
They’re also one of the most common avoidable engineering failures.
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Uncategorized | Owen | 
November 19, 2008 12:18 am | 
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