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Version Control: Design for Integration July 30, 2007

Posted by Ian Clatworthy in Bazaar, Collaboration, Open Source, Software Architecture.
2 comments

Can you name a single successful software product where more resources (time and money) were spend on developing it than integrating it with other products and systems? I don’t believe such software products exist. Is that likely to change? If not, what can we do about it as software developers? And what does that mean for those of us interested in streamlining how developers work in general and delivering better version control tools in particular?

#5 on my list of criteria for evaluating version control tools is Integration. Software exists to get things done and it rarely, if ever, exists in isolation. The more successful software is, the more pressure there is to integrate it with other tools and systems. I believe lack of mature integration with other systems will be the #1 reason for many teams delaying their move from a central VCS tool (like CVS and SVN) to a distributed VCS tool (like Bazaar, Git or Mercurial) in the next 12 months. The good news is that the new breed of VCS tools all do a lot right in terms of enabling integration but we need to do much more. Firstly, we could and ought to be doing more at the core of the new products. Secondly, we need to get behind the really important integration add-ons and help them reach maturity faster.

At the core product level, Design for Integration comes down to four key things … (more…)

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Version Control: Plug-ins vs Toolkits July 18, 2007

Posted by Ian Clatworthy in Bazaar, Collaboration, Software Architecture.
12 comments

There’s no such thing as the perfect version control tool and there never will be. That’s why extensibility is #4 on my list of evaluation criteria for VCS tools. There will always be pressure on these tools to enable new ways of working, provide more information for decision making and provide smarter integration with other tools. Over and above that, extensibility is really important for both technical and social reasons.

Technically, trying to ship a tool which is all things to all people creates all sorts of problems particularly w.r.t. reliability, my #1 evaluation criteria. Bloatware takes longer to ship each time, quality typically drops regardless, and the extra features don’t necessarily hit the mark anyway. As Mozilla has shown with Firefox and Thunderbird in recent years, it is far better to produce a rock solid core product that supports plug-ins in a documented way. Done right, the result is higher quality, better performance, and extensions that better meet the needs of the user base anyway.

Socially, a plug-in architecture increases the engagement of the community that grows around successful products. Whether open source or commercial, it takes a community to raise great software and plug-ins let that community scratch their itches in a sanctioned way.

There are different ways of tackling the extensibility challenge but the best way in my experience is by explicitly supporting plug-ins as Bazaar and Mercurial do. Other tools like Git have gone down the well worn toolkit path, and while that’s much better than having a monolithic application, I believe the plug-in path is a wiser one for a host of reasons.

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