Computery

Why Trac sucks

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Reasons to use Trac:

  • It has been around for ages so it's pretty well known.
  • It works with Subversion.
  • Built-in Wiki.
  • The milestones system works fairly well.

Why Trac sucks, IMHO of course:

  • It's written in Python, a language I currently don't know nor have a (current) inclination to learn.
  • It doesn't do git without a plugin.
  • How do I get email notifications when something's changed in the wiki?
  • How do I get email notifications when code changes are uploaded?
  • Each project you want to manage with it gets its own separate install, which is very klunky. You have to log into each one separately (unless you set up a shared authentication system of some sort in the web server).
  • Each project only gets one repository.
  • The interface is klunky, e.g. clicking View Tickets brings you to a page where you first have to choose your filter rather than just loading the last one used or a default.
  • No task associations so you can't do a parent-child dependency to indicate a completion hierarchy.
  • The interface should allow for trag-n-drop changing of priorities.
  • It isn't github or unfuddle or Redmine :)

Personally I recommend github for public projects where you don't need task management (I don't like Lighthouse), Unfuddle for closed projects or where you want good task management for your open project, or Redmine if you want full control and to host it all yourself.

Just thought I'd share that.

Key Drupal 5 concept - boxes are not automatic

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A key feature in Drupal is being able to create plugins/modules that create their own blocks, chunks of functionality that can be placed anywhere on the page by using the blocks/regions configuration or panels. If you do happen to create your own, bear in mind that while you automatically gain the features of the mail blocks table, you do not gain access to the boxes table, so you have to create your own body content block. Just thought you should know. And yes, this fact has just dawned on me. Doh.

Why does PHP still suck on OSX?

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I'm a little puzzled and frustrated with Apple.

With Macs, or more specifically OSX, becoming the platform of choice for web developers world over, why do they still insist in neutering our capabilities by bundling limited versions of the most common web development tools rather than all or nothing? With Leopard they at least improved the Ruby install to the point it was useful (you could actually now run Rails without having to compile from source) but PHP is missing so much functionality through the lack of pear and shared libraries to make it a pain to use.

On Linux it's almost standard practice to compile PHP from source, because so few installations include all of the required libraries (due to varied quantities of "suck"). Amusingly on Windows you can obtain all of the libraries out of the box and just enable the ones needed. Contrast this to OSX, which promotes itself as being so much better than Windows, and you get the worst of both worlds - no source to compile and an incomplete binary install.

Even if they insist in bundling their own customized build with the OS, the least they could do is make all of their customized source builds available through MacForge, which would allow those of us who need more than the basics to at least keep our recompilations matched to Apple's standards.

Come on Apple, do the right thing!

geocoder forked & uploaded to github

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For a Rails project I'm working on I started using the geocoder gem for zipcode validation. Unfortunately the release that was available via gem was flaky and would often crash if you queried for just a zipcode instead of a full address. With some digging around I discovered that the code in its subversion repository had some fixes applied that hadn't been pushed out to the gem, and after testing them it sure enough was much more robust. Well, this sounded like an excellent use of github! So what I've done is uploaded the SVN code to a new project, I've updated the version number and marked it as available for downloading as a gem. Go git some geocoder goodness!

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