Inessential Weirdnesses
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I've seen certain third-party tools not be able to display a lot of content that was created in the Adobe programs. My wife had an awful time with OpenOffice in this regard.
I had a terrible time trying to open an SVG in Adobe products. I wouldn't mind as much, but fucking browsers can do it well.
Guess it goes both ways...
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OpenOffice
Be careful with OpenOffice. For some reason, it sometimes shits itself badly when saving data out and creates a corrupt file (because using zero-length PNG file for an embedded image is a great idea?!) I've not had the time to see what triggers it; I've only ever been in the position to pick up the pieces afterwards (when a colleague sent me the result saying that he'd “merged his additions in”). Microsoft Word seems to hardly ever do so nasty a thing.
OTOH, OO also copes better with the resulting junk than MS Office, so make of it what you will…
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Ditched it in favor of LibreOffice now.
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I just unzipped the archive (and the old version too) and did a proper merge by hand. Because I'm smarter than any computer program. (Except at chess, where I just can't bring myself to give a shit.)
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People around here love to send Word documents as a container for screen grabs.
THEY SHOULD BE KILLED!!! ONE BY ONE!!! Or all together at once
And let's add people who send files by mail but don't bother naming them. How the fuck do you want me to know what map1.xlsx is and what difference it has with map2.xlsx. Oh I see the second one contains your screenshot. Your entire screen. Showing off your second monitor. With nothing on it except the background you use of your partner/children/dog...
STOP FUCKING DOING THAT SHIT!!!
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@blakeyrat said:
projects that use Git make everybody use Git, not just the programmers
I find that this point is overlooked quite frequently.
That's because this point is bollocks.
I'll do that again, with emphasis.
Using git is necessary in most cases because people want free project hosting, and github is pretty much **it** in terms of usability and visibility. Projects that use git force *users* to be able to use a browser, that's it.
Anyway, if you want hard to use, try any project that uses bzr. There's a couple of projects I use which are hosted on bazaar, I have to use the unofficial git repositories to even get to them. Even git's bizarre command-line stuff looks good compared to merely trying to install bzr.
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github is pretty much it in terms of usability
Usability? GitHub's fucking awful. The best thing I can say about it is that it's better than SourceForge. But, then again, so are most tropical diseases.
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That's because this point is bollocks.
I see your "Download Zip" button, and yes that's pretty easy.
Where's the "Upload Zip" button for the non technical folks (asset designers, multimedia people, etc...)? How can they contribute?
Not that simple eh?
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Where's the "Upload Zip" button for the non technical folks (asset designers, multimedia people, etc...)? How can they contribute?
The real shame is that there's a really, really clear business case here for a new product. But nobody in the open source community will recognize/build it.
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I see your "Download Zip" button, and yes that's pretty easy.
Where's the "Upload Zip" button for the non technical folks (asset designers, multimedia people, etc...)? How can they contribute?
Getting copies of the most recent commit and zipping them is easy.
Taking a zip of files and merging them in automatically without any manual intervention is not. Does any source control system do that?
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Even if it did, that would be a particularly shitty way of dealing with art assets, CSS, copy, and audio.
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Usability? GitHub's fucking awful.
What do you think is actually (relatively) good? What source control system? What project host?
The real shame is that there's a really, really clear business case here for a new product. But nobody in the open source community will recognize/build it.
I don't even understand your mentality here. No one is building a product that has a clear business case and you only blame OS people for the oversight? Is it not also a shame that commercial entities are failing to build a proprietary version? Or is there already a proprietary form of such a product?
Even if it did, that would be a particularly shitty way of dealing with art assets, CSS, copy, and audio.
Uploading a zip would be a shitty way? Full-auto merging?
But you also think it's a shame that some people are failing to recognize the potential of the approach?
wat?
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I don't even understand your mentality here. No one is building a product that has a clear business case and you only blame OS people for the oversight? Is it not also a shame that commercial entities are failing to build a proprietary version? Or is there already a proprietary form of such a product?
It doesn't matter, because if there was a proprietary version the open source people wouldn't touch it. Instead, they'd clone it and use the clone. The company who developed it would be out a ton of money.
Which is probably exactly why nobody's making it. There's no business case there.
Uploading a zip would be a shitty way? Full-auto merging?
Right and then a bunch of .cpp files are missing, and the developer complains and the artist goes, "oh those were all over the folder, not sure what they're for so I just deleted them from my copy."
But you also think it's a shame that some people are failing to recognize the potential of the approach?
There is no potential.
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@Blakeyrat said:
Usability? GitHub's fucking awful.
What do you think is actually (relatively) good? What source control system? What project host?Uh...anyone here tried Mercurial and BitBucket? They both work quite nicely for me, and Mercurial has had a much better time of it usability-wise than Git has...
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Right and then a bunch of .cpp files are missing, and the developer complains and the artist goes, "oh those were all over the folder, not sure what they're for so I just deleted them from my copy."
That'd be why you keep the code in a separate repository from the assets. Leave the assets to the asshats.
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Leave the assets to the asshats.
"Gee, I wonder why open source projects have trouble engaging with non-coders!"
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/me takes a bow
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Right and then a bunch of .cpp files are missing, and the developer complains and the artist goes, "oh those were all over the folder, not sure what they're for so I just deleted them from my copy."
It would delete any files not present in the zip? Maybe just don't have it work that way - since it has a distinct interface and a distinct purpose from normal merging? Or have an option that defaults to not deleting files missing from the zip?
There's no business case there.
You just said there was.
There is no potential.
There's no potential, but...
there's a really, really clear business case here for a new product. But nobody in the open source community will recognize/build it.
wat?
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He's got a point.
OSS primarily starts with scratching own itches, and if there's something 'good enough', it tends to get used, which is why Github is as prevalent as it is.
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Uh...anyone here tried Mercurial and BitBucket? They both work quite nicely for me, and Mercurial has had a much better time of it usability-wise than Git has...
"usability"? It has a better GUI? It is more convenient for certain kinds of operations?
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But more seriously, when the obvious quipping doesn't overwhelm me, the assets can be easily tracked in a system like git; the main real issue is that it's not very good at handling large binary data. (Alternatively, it's optimised for text source files.) Because any sane system (and also git!) allows you to work on a branch or create a branch from a point in the past, so making it actually trivial to recover deleted stuff and so on, it wouldn't be too hard.
It's git's poor handling of binary data that is more likely to be a problem; git is pretty shitty at binaries.
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Commercial software primarily starts with scratching an itch, and if there's something 'good enough', it tends to get used, which is why Windows is as prevalent as it is.
Yep.
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I have no idea how Windows came to be unleashed on the world, honestly. It's such a clusterfuck.
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I have no idea how Windows came to be unleashed on the world, honestly. It's such a clusterfuck.
Because it's "good enough". Everything suffers from that problem.
It's true of FOSS.
It's true of commercial/proprietary software.Pointing out it's a problem with FOSS isn't a case against FOSS.
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Ah, but it is. Just for different reasons.
Businesses build things to be good enough because they can't spend forever building something to make it perfect. They have an implied deadline all the time to ship a product, because no product = no revenue = no business.
FOSS ships invariably when they feel like it. But they have little incentive to push hard to improve. Whereas the paid crowd by definition have to compete, because they have to fight to justify their existence against the others in the market (generally), the FOSS crowd doesn't have that impetus.
And by and large, they are very content to ship something good enough rather than pushing something that is compelling enough to get users to migrate.
Business pushes good enough because they have constraints. FOSS pushes good enough because it's good enough and there's not enough care to be better than merely good enough.
There are exceptions in both crowds but this is how it has been in my experience. (Disclaimer; I have been a major contributor to open source and found significant disillusionment over this fundamental point. Good enough is not good enough for me.)
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FOSS projects don't have constraints? People have unlimited amounts of free time to put into the project? They don't have to prioritize what they're going to focus on?
And you accept that both parties are guilty of "good enough" inertia, but FOSS is more guilty because they aren't getting paid for their time?
There's also the idea that money is a better motivator for building quality than personal pride or self-satisfaction. Do you believe that? What makes you believe that? There is research to the contrary (
this book, at leastit doesn't look like the book actually contains any evidence, just anecdotes). Is there evidence supporting the idea that money is the better motivator? We'd have to put some real time into researching this.
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"usability"? It has a better GUI? It is more convenient for certain kinds of operations?
Better GUI (especially on Windows)
Better documentation (tutorials etal)
Easier to get help/support for
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What about BitBucket? As a project host, do you prefer it to GitHub?
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FOSS pushes good enough because it's good enough and there's not enough care to be better than merely good enough.
Except the FOSS definition of "good enough" is also a lot shittier than the commercial definition of "good enough". Generally speaking.
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Have you noticed that Discourse threads don't seem to peter-out after 3-4 days like they did on the old forum? Instead people keep posting weeks later.
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FOSS has different constraints. The problem is that the biggest one - which is money - is missing. There is something about money that puts focus on what gets done when.
And in an ideal world, paid software should be better because of the increased competitiveness and survival of the fittest aspects. The reality, of course, is much different.
It's not that the FOSS people aren't getting paid for their time that's the driver. It's the need to ship something, on time, within a budget, with a modest quality level. FOSS does NOT have those constraints unless it puts those constraints on itself.
Money is a better motivator, sure. It doesn't mean you get better quality at all, however. It just means you are more likely to get something sooner.
I find this hard to admit but I'm agreeing with @blakeyrat on this. By and large, FOSS's 'good enough' IS worse than commercial's 'good enough'.
There's simply less desire to make something better than 'good enough' because when you're doing it as a hobby and you get it doing what it needs to do, where's the incentive to do more? Yes, personal pride comes in. yes, self-satisfaction comes in. Except they do not come in nearly as much as you might like to believe. I am something of a refugee from this. Remember, it was not so long ago that I was accused of having anxiety about code quality by one person in an open source project. Because for me 'good enough' was not good enough.
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Have you noticed that Discourse threads don't seem to peter-out after 3-4 days like they did on the old forum? Instead people keep posting weeks later.
Yes, because Discourse has a fun habit of promoting old threads, contrary to Jeff's stated intentions of keeping things on topic (and thus an implied current-ness and relevancy)
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Except the FOSS definition of "good enough" is also a lot shittier than the commercial definition of "good enough". Generally speaking.
What makes you say that?
Also, consider that different products will be better or worse in different ways.
So, if one's focus is on available functionality, the product would be a swiss-army knife with a CLI-only interface. More than good enough in available functions, shitty interface. You might say it's shit.
If one's focus is on usability, it might have only a few functions, but a great GUI interface (and great CLI) and an API and most people figure it out quickly. But it has shit in terms of available functionality. So I think it's shit.
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The same thing which makes me say it: prolonged exposure to both commercial and FOSS applications in the same space.
GIMP on OS X, for example is a great example. Not to mention GTK anyway, but GIMP on OS X has an interesting bug whereby you have to select everything twice for it to be registered. I don't mean the usual realms of focus-on-window, but you have do what seems like focus-on-X11, then whatever it was you were going to do. And this is considered good enough.
I ended up just going off and buying Pixelmator instead.
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Money is a better motivator, sure. It doesn't mean you get better quality at all, however. It just means you are more likely to get something sooner.
I thought you were trying to argue that money motivated quality?
I am something of a refugee from this. Remember, it was not so long ago that I was accused of having anxiety about code quality by one person in an open source project. Because for me 'good enough' was not good enough.
I can't remember ever having a manager that was concerned about code quality.
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Ha!
When I used Sibelius (a CCSS score-writer product) on windows - if I middle-clicked anywhere on the window, the program would freeze and have to be killed. Unsaved work lost.
let CCSS = Commercial, Closed Source Software
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What makes you say that?
Because I've used a lot of commercial software, and I've used a lot of open source software. That's not to say commercial software is universally better, but on average I believe it's quite a bit better.
Sony Vegas, or whatever the hell it's called now, is the worst (and also cheapest) commercial video editing project on Windows. It blows the shit out of the best open source video editing project. There's not even any competition. It's miles ahead.
GIMP vs. Photoshop is another good example. But you don't even need to compare it to Photoshop, try CorelDRAW... CorelDRAW, the "discount" commercial version, still blows GIMP out of the water, easily. I'm not comparing to the industry leader apps here, I'm comparing to the low-tier commercial apps.
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Hey I like CorelDRAW.
Also, you probably meant PhotoPaint, CorelDRAW is for vector graphics.
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or an Undo command
It's funny, Git is one of the few file-system-manipulating CLI programs that comes with an undo command.
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I don't see anything in that thread that looks like an undo command.
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What about BitBucket? As a project host, do you prefer it to GitHub?
BitBucket supports Hg, which GitHub doesn't.
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git refloggives you a list of glorified undo points with arbitrary exadecimal labels.http://gitready.com/images/reflog.png
You give one of those labels to
git reset --hardand it brings the commit tree back to that point.(Image from this article.)
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Well, I mean, does BitBucket have things like an issue tracker, communication between users, pull request system, something like GitHub Pages, etc.? And are they any good in practice?
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Well, I mean, does BitBucket have things like an issue tracker, communication between users, pull request system, something like GitHub Pages, etc.? And are they any good in practice?
Issue tracker: you have a basic one that comes with that's pretty decent for being skeletal, or they can provide you with a JIRA instance if you need the 800-lb gorilla of bug tracking.
Inter-user communication: no clue
Pull requests: I'm pretty sure they support it
Pages: Don't think so, but I'm not for sure. I think they do support per-project Wikis (Confluence or the likes) though.
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And yet, that is nothing like an Undo command.
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Got any recommendations for commercial source control systems?
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I'm inclined to believe you, but in what ways does CorelDRAW blow GIMP out of the water?
It's more usable? How is it more usable?
It's more or better features? What additional features does it have? How are the similar features better?
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GIMP isn't a fair comparison. Even Notepad blows GIMP out of the water as an image editing tool. Making fun of GIMP is like hopping aboard the short bus and ridiculing everyone, it's not enough of a challenge to be any fun.
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Use both and decide on your own. I'm not going to sit here and be grilled for 58 hours. AKA "Boomzilla'ed".
At some point, you're just going to have to accept that you have an opinion that is counter to mine. You can either accept that, or you can spend the next 23 days asking me increasingly pedantic questions. Except you can't, because I won't play along with that bullshit anymore.
If you genuinely believe GIMP is better than CorelDRAW/PhotoPaint, congratulations: you win a "I don't give a shit" point.
If you're completely ignorant of CorelDRAW/PhotoPaint, then you'll either have to educate yourself or just trust me.
