Xaprb

Sourceforge has reintroduced persistent login cookies. Here’s the bug request I submitted about this, a long time ago.

The thing is, I don’t really care much anymore. I’ve moved my open-source projects off Sourceforge onto Google Code. I am about 10x more productive there.

This lesson can be applied to pretty much everything on the web these days. Make it even the slightest bit hard to use your service, and people will use what’s easy instead. (Sourceforge’s user interface is more than slightly hard to use.)

The New York Times is the same way for me. They want me to log in to read the news stories. They say it’s free, and I say ok, then why do I need an account? Forget it.

Am I selfish? Do I want something for nothing? Am I lazy and impatient beyond imagining? Yes.

Am I typical? Yes.

Google Code just rocks. It is clean, sparse, elegant, and it has all the functionality I need. Its template-driven issue tracking system (totally flexible and totally easy to flex!), niceties like cross-references between issues and Subversion revisions, simple but completely adequate Wiki, and nice download system are the bomb. And the code reviews and ability to comment on revisions are super nice. Oh, and it’s really nice that the data is stored in a place I feel pretty sure is safe.

It has all the nice features I admired a lot about Trac, which is my other favorite collaboration tool for software development.

A while ago I moved Maatkit development to Google Code from Sourceforge. It was a move I’d been considering but dreading. A friend pushed me over the edge by promising to migrate the Subversion repo for me. In all it was really painless, and certainly a move that has enabled Maatkit’s development to proceed much more quickly and smoothly than it would have at Sourceforge. Not to pick on Sourceforge, but their interface is seemingly designed to prevent you from getting anything done — it is really hard to use in about every possible way, and makes simple tasks take hours (making a new release, anyone?). And Sourceforge doesn’t even back up your data! What’s the point of project hosting if you’re supposed to back up your own revision control, website, and database?

Thank you Google!

Download Maatkit

Maatkit version 2152 is ready for download. This release is also known as the “is this project really alive?” release. We thought we should delay until MySQL released a new Community Server version. Just kidding — it has nothing to do with that.