Today is a day for... Miscellany!

ORMs

Re my long post on object-relational mappers:

Jonathan Ellis points me towards a fairly negative post on PostgreSQL table inheritance, which cucumber2 uses. The thread basically states that no one is maintaining table inheritance and that only inertia is keeping it in the code. My impression was somewhat the opposite: I've seen statements that table inheritance will not be taken out, because there are people using it. *shrug* It's a neat feature, IMO.

Jonathan also points me towards PyDO2, which seems to have good documentation and a philosophy that supports working on the database with other tools. I've seen PyDO before but never had a chance to play with it seriously. I like the look of the code, though, on a cursory inspection.

Runar's Blog (written by Runar?) has a long post on relational model vs Python. Haven't finished digesting it yet. One particularly interesting link (broken in that article) is to SQLAlchemy.

An Open-Source Story: Producing Error-Free Software is Hard

Via RISKS, this story on an optimization bug in gcc (or so I infer) that affected X, and perhaps many other pieces of code. Whoo.

Python Docs

Stephen Ferg e-mailed me about my earlier post on Python docs. He pointed me towards a long, fascinating thread on Python doc updates.

I'll go into this more later, but it's worth mentioning that anecdotal evidence from genome annotation suggests that the PHP model (of allowing at least somewhat uncontrolled posting of information to docs) elicites far more contributions than rigorous up-front quality control. The reason? Experts won't go out of their way to add information on something they understand well, but they will put in the time to correct something that's just plain wrong. So you've just got to put in mechanisms to facilitate this kind of interaction.

Using arch/darcs from Windwows

In a response to my open source project truisms page, Moof points out that darcs and arch don't work very well for Windows. I'm sure he's right: I tend to forget about that platform; when I do have to develop for it, I try to use cygwin. So to get Windows developers you've got to use something like svn or CVS. And, as he points out, there are a lot more Windows developers out there than developers for any other platform... so you

want to get Windows developers.

Are there any darcs competitors out there for TortoiseSVN?

Moof also echoes Marius Gedminas's point that idea that Trac is something worth keeping an eye on. Trac is dangerously close to becoming "SourceForge in a box", which would be a good answer to most of my suggestions on how to run an OSS project.

In other news, it may be time to go get a blog that allows comments ;).

--titus