kugelfish

A while back, I had done some research into what I would do at this point to set up again the basic software development infrastructure for a new startup project - with hindsight and the state of open-source development tools of ca 2007. Again the goal of the experiment is to spend little or no money, use only free and open-source software and end up with a solution which could be set up from scratch in only a few days. Here are the basic choices of the 2007 edition software development infrastructure (to be elaborated in future posts): The entire development support infrastructure should again be able to run on a single machine. For the experiment, I used my home server running Sabayon Linux a more user friendly version of the Gentoo source based Linux distribution. We assume that this machine is behind a firewall and cannot be accessed from the outside. As the version control system, I chose Subversion (svn). Svn is mature, stable, well supported and largely accepted to be the n

Merging concurrent or overlapping changes to the same piece of source-code is one of the basic operations to support collaborative development and is supported in some form by most modern version control systems. Merging is required if changes from two different branches have to be reconciled - these could be branches created explicitly or implicitly by two users editing the same file concurrently as in the example below. In the example below, Alice and Bob are both making changes to the same file. After Alice has submitted a new version, Bob needs to merge the changes into his client view before submitting a new version. Typically a merge is required if a branch is being closed, but the current head version (R43 in the example) on the parent branch where it had branched off from earlier is no longer identical to the version from which it was branched off (R42) - i.e. changes have happened in parallel on both the parent and its derived branch. In such cases a 3-way merge operation can

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the concept and Zeitgeist heavy startups of the web age , is the kind of startup without neither any particularly great new idea, nor a secret new technology, simply doing something which is really hard to do and only very few people would know how. During the late 1990ies, the Internet had been growing by leaps and bounds, requiring a doubling in capacity every couple of months for many types of networks and networking gear was constantly running out of steam and needed to be upgraded with the next generation of higher capacity equipment. So just building the next bigger, better gear sounded like a reasonable thing to do, except that it was easier said than done - specially at a breakneck pace of 18-24 months development cycles, barely ahead of Moore's law . Until recently, building telecom and networking equipment had been a relatively specialized niche craft, practiced mostly in the R&D labs of a small number of companies, selling to