Re: Last gasp

Alex wrote:
> Jay Levitt<jay(dot)levitt(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>
>> Alex wrote:
>>> I didn't follow this whole thread, but have we considered Redmine[1]?
>> As the resident "Ruby is shiny, let's do everything in Rails on my
>> MacBook" guy, I'd like to make a statement against interest: I've
>> tried Redmine a few times and it's been painful. Much of the codebase
>> is deprecated, it's slow, it has no meaningful search (in 2012?!),
>> I've seen wiki edits disappear, and at the moment pulling up its own
>> FAQ page at redmine.org times out.
>
> Yay, that's totally FUD to me.

You're right, it was. My bad. Someday I will find the balance between
precision and concision.

> Could you please elaborate a bit on your points?
>
> Deprecated codebase? Let me guess...
>
> It runs on an outdated version of Rails (2.3) but only because Rails is
> changing so rapidly, I believe. There is work in progress[1] to move to
> the supported branch Rails-3.x.

I wasn't even thinking of that; I know many production systems still run on
Rails 2.3, and in fact it probably even performs better for some workloads.
3.x is a mixed bag. I don't hold that against Redmine.

But it's still FUD, because I can't remember where I saw this information.
So: withdrawn.

>
> Slow? Do you have any data to back this point up?

No measurable data; just a sigh of relief when switching from Redmine to
Github - and GitHub ain't a speed demon. In general, I've seen multi-second
page load times on crazy-simple things like wiki edits; this was on a hosted
provider (sourcerepo.com), but they also hosted our git repo and we had no
speed problems there.

> No meaningful search, eh? Works for me.

Redmine searches return partial-word matches, and there's no way to disable
that. Searching for "test" finds "latest". To me, that's broken.

Also, the UI is very 5 years ago; e.g., "compare revisions" uses the same
columns-of-radio-buttons approach as MediaWiki. If the goal is a tool to
reduce friction and increase involvement, you want a smoother UX.

Jay