A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, …). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository).
Archive for the ‘Psi’ Category
Trying out Git
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008Going Agile with Google Summer of Code
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Although Psi has had a fair number of succesful Google Summer of Code projects so far, we have experienced some failures as well: the summer before last, 3 out of 6 projects didn’t make the final deadline. A project’s failure was typically due to not having anything really usable at the end of the summer, regardless of the good work that was done during the past months. To reduce the risk of such surprises, I decided to take an Agile Development approach for this year’s ‘Roster improvement’ project.
Mimicking Jaiku with Psi
Friday, May 2nd, 2008The day before yesterday, Peter Saint-Andre sent out a couple of Jaiku invites to all Jabber Google Summer of Code students and their mentors, including me. Never having looked at microblogging before, I toyed around with it a bit, and it quickly reminded me that I still had something on my Psi wish-list for a while now: a flat, live log of all Jabber events in your network. Since I had a long weekend, I quickly coded up a prototype, and hooked it into Psi.
Improving Psi’s roster
Thursday, May 1st, 2008For a while now, Psi users have been requesting several changes and additions to the roster (or `contact list‘). These requests include grouping contacts into meta-contacts, nested roster groups, and displaying user avatars in the roster. We have been postponing all these changes to the roster as much as possible, because none of us wanted to touch the roster code, for reasons I’ll explain below. This year, Psi is fortunate enough to have Adam Czachorowski (aka Gislan), a student from the Google Summer of Code, to work on roster improvements.
