Max Kanat-Alexander

Wow, so it's been a while, but I've just released VCI 0.5.1! This release focused on some pretty big performance improvements, and I also fixed some important bugs that were preventing the CVS and Subversion drivers from working in some environments.

If you're using VCI, I'd really like to know! I kind of live in a void, with it, because there's no way to get download stats from CPAN, and I only hear from people if they have a problem (and only then if they choose to email me!). So just let me know if you're using it, and if you like it, or if you think there's some improvements you'd like to see in it, or whatever! :-)

-Max

I've started a new technical blog, called Code Simplicity. You can get an idea of what it's going to be about by reading my first article, Welcome To Code Simplicity!.

If you'd like, you can subscribe using the RSS Feed, or for us LJ users, I've syndicated it to codesimplicity, so you can add it to your friends list that way. People can also subscribe via email, using a form on left-hand side of the site itself.

I'll probably be talking about Bugzilla and VCI there, instead of here.

This blog on LiveJournal will continue to exist as my personal blog, where I'll talk about music, anime, or whatever silly thing strikes my fancy at the moment. :-)

-Max

I just uploaded VCI 0.4.1 to CPAN! This version focused on taint safety and internal API improvements. VCI should now be taint-safe in all drivers except Git. If any part of VCI isn't taint-safe, that's a bug now.

It also fixed some bugs and annoyances in Svn and Bzr, and is generally just a nice polish release.

Now that VCI is taint-safe, I'd feel okay about promoting it widely, perhaps writing some articles about it, and so forth. And I think I'm going to start working on some Bugzilla integration using VCI, when I get the chance (unless somebody else wants to help out with that!).

-Max

It's been a little while since my last release of VCI, but today I just released VCI 0.3.1! Hooray! :-)

I've been focusing a lot on internal work at Everything Solved, which has actually been fun. I really like my company.

But I had VCI on my mind, and I'd finally come up with a way to solve a really weird Subversion bug that was blocking the release. So here it is! It has some bug fixes, and a few new features, mostly ones that bricas wanted, since he's making a web-based repository browser using VCI and Catalyst (which I think is a really cool idea).

At some point I may integrate VCI with Bugzilla, so that Bugzilla can view patches from other VCSes than CVS. Anybody who wants to help with that, let me know! VCI's pretty much ready, but we have to see if we can replace PatchReader with VCI, or if we have to re-build PatchReader to use VCI.

-Max

Okay, another major release of VCI today. :-) I added lots of neat stuff. Oddly enough, File::content was really easy to write, and adding "revision" to get_file was much harder.

I actually had this release basically done several days ago, but sometimes I like to let development code sit around for a little while, to make sure I haven't forgotten anything, or to see if anybody says, "Hey, don't do such-and-such, that's not good!"

There's a few other new features and API changes too. It should show up on CPAN in an hour or so.

-Max

I just uploaded VCI 0.1.1 to CPAN! :-) I added tests for every driver, which found and fixed all sorts of bugs. Tests Are Good. This is the first version of VCI that I'd feel fairly comfortable about recommending that people use, which is pretty good since the first version was only about a week and a half ago.

This version also has the ability to see a Commit as a Diff, so you can see what changes were made to the files.

I started thinking, "Hrm, what would I use VCI for?" and the first thing that came to mind was improving Bugzilla's "patch reader" to work with multiple VCSes. So I'm going to be adding functionality in that direction.

Next will be parsing an already-existing diff from a VCS and creating a Commit or Diff object out of it. You could actually already do that, but it wouldn't really have enough info for Bugzilla to use it.

Also, I think the Bonsai guys are going to use VCI to make a new version of Bonsai that can interact with different VCSes than just CVS, so that's pretty exciting. I'm really looking forward to seeing how people use VCI, and what they use it for. :-) If you're using it, let me know!

Oh, and I have an IRC channel for VCI now, too: #vci on irc.perl.org. I'm there whenever I'm online, pretty much.

-Max

I mentioned this briefly in my last post, but here's a real announcement. :-)

"Long have we toiled on our tools that interact with CVS. Oh, wait, you mean we're switching to Subversion? Oh...long have we toiled on...what, we're switching to Git?" -The Oppressed Development Tools Maintainer

So, I wanted to write a simple tool that displayed some information about version-control systems (or "software change management" systems, as some are called). I went looking through CPAN, thinking, "Surely, there must be a single module that can interact with many different VCSes, right?"

But surprisingly, there wasn't. There was the VCS module, and I spoke with its maintainer and he said that he'd always wanted to re-write it in an object-oriented fashion, but had never found the time to do so.

So, I wrote VCI, the generic Version Control Interface. Currently it can display the history and contents of CVS, Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git. It's easy to write new drivers for other VCSes, you just make a new package in the VCI::VCS namespace. (And if you read the VCI code and documentation, you'll see it's easy to write a driver.)

VCI is object-oriented. It uses Moose.

VCI aims to provide a broad set of features while still working well with all the different VCSes commonly in use. The rationale, structure, and functionality of VCI is described in the documentation of the VCI module.

You can find VCI on the CPAN. VCI also has a (currently minimal) homepage.

The code is currently alpha-quality. Stability and performance improvements are coming in the future.

I'm very interested in knowing who's using VCI, and am very willing to have contributions and new drivers from any programmer who feels competent enough to design quality code.

You can direct any questions, comments, or patches to me at mkanat[at]cpan[dot]org.

I hope that you find VCI useful!

-Max

Well, it happened several days ago now, but I released four versions of Bugzilla. I'm getting pretty good at the release process, particularly doing it all myself in a single go. I wrote everything myself this time. It didn't take a particularly long time to do (a few hours, maybe), but it did take a while for me to have the time to do it.

I'm really happy with 3.0.1, it's like a "make 3.0 perfect" release. It took a lot longer than I would have liked after 3.0 for us to release it, but it seems that people were happy enough with 3.0 (considering our record download numbers) that it wasn't a huge issue.

We also released 3.1.1, which has a lot of exciting new features and a new skin. We'll see what people think about the new skin. :-) You can see it on the demo installation if you want.

VCI

In other news, I just recently released the first version of a new thing I'm working on, VCI! The idea of VCI is to make a single library that can interact with all the different version-control systems out there. Right now it supports Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, and CVS. And I wrote the whole thing in just a few weeks.

A lot of operations are fairly slow on large repositories at the moment, but that can be improved in the future. Right now I have to decide whether I want to improve the performance of the existing drivers, add new features to VCI, or wait for some users and work on stabilization of the current code.

Anyhow, I'm generally pretty excited about VCI, it should be pretty useful. All the comments I've gotten so far have been extremely positive.

-Max