Comments on: Growth limits of open-source vis-a-vis MySQL Toolkit

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:14:11 +0000

Hi Peter,

I think once I get finished ripping out all the copy/pasted code and replacing it with unit-tested code, releases will be very good quality. I am pretty decent at writing tests — I just didn’t do it previously. (again, I am not sure why).

You can contribute to sponsoring my week off work if you’d like. I think that will be highly productive.

Help on the code is always welcome too, but I understand not everyone wants to (or can) do that.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:55:28 +0000

Another option is to grow the number of people hacking on the code. I suspect with decent unit testing and good regressions, you could end up with fairly stable releases.

That said, thanks for writing all of this! It saved me quite a bit of time over this last week. If I can help in any way, please do let me know.

Best,

-Peter

By: fenway

fenway — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:11:18 +0000

Agreed… it sounds like the platform/OS cross-dependency issues are the real deal-breaker here.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:20:33 +0000

I’m open to hearing what they are, but it’s not getting modules included that’s too much trouble in the general case. It usually works fine. It’s when someone who doesn’t know Perl well emails me saying “hi, I’m in the field with a consulting client and they have Perl 4.x running on Solaris, and I can’t get this working. I don’t know Perl. Can you help?” I’m trying to make this easy for these folks so they don’t have to ask for help. I’ve had this trouble with innotop, which has a parser module that several people have had trouble getting innotop to find. In the future innotop will be a single file, too.

Sometimes even the basic “perl Makefile.PL; make install” routine doesn’t go smoothly (example: it doesn’t work at all on Windows). For that reason, my goal is that you should be able to untar the downloaded file and run it with NO installation or anything else necessary (it’s just a convenience for those who want it). I can’t help it that DBI and DBD::mysql are prerequisites, but I can avoid as many other prerequisites as possible.

I gave some specific examples of what’s hard for people, but in general, what’s hard for people is if they’re expected to understand how Perl works, so I want to shield them from it as much as possible. That mindset may deserve criticism, but ultimately I think it makes it easier for people to benefit from the tools.

By: fenway

fenway — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:04:23 +0000

At the risk of sounding obvious, there are a multitude of ways to get modules to be included without too much trouble… I can only assume you didn’t like them, because they *do* exist.