Integration strategies

We use perforce at work. Although people talk a lot of smack about perforce, I actually find it to be generally quite acceptable at what it does.

However, I've been hitting some snags as of late. Ultimately, the issue comes down to branching, and how to keep multiple trees in sync for a particular set of tools.

Although the perforce website has a lot of white papers on various subjects, I haven't really found anything there that describes what I'm looking for. Even the white paper on branching describes exactly what I don't want. What I really want is a way to say: "Hey, even though I need to have this file replicated to these 17 different locations, they're really the same file. And if someone changes one of them, I want you to think of that as changing all of them."

Unfortunately, this is functionality that perforce adamently denies has any place in the real world. Well, here I am, maintaining around 17 trees, and I'm telling you that this functionality would probably remove about three hours a day from my work day.

The usual way we deal with this is to relocate the relevant tools outside of the branched codebase, and then point everything at the new location. Unfortunately, this is a manual, time consuming process. It sucks, and I don't like repeating work again and again (which is pretty much what I'm doing now).

So the question I put out there is: does anyone have a better way than these two methods? To sum up, here they were:

• Code lives in an area that's branched, and changes need to be propogated everywhere to keep everything in sync.
• Code lives in an area that isn't branched, but this is usually a hindsight realization so it requires manual updates of all related tools to pick the tool up from the new location.

Oh, and as an added complication, what do you do when 99% of the code is independent of the release branch, but the last little bit depends on code in a branch? What then?

Where are the books for experienced programmers?

Recently, I've been reading books on how to develop websites using "Web 2.0" techniques (basically AJAX). What I've noticed about these books--and even other coding books in my library--is that there is a serious lack of books for the experienced, well-disciplined programmer.

I honestly find it a little insulting that every book on C++ feels the need to re-explain to me APIE (Abstraction, Polymorphism, Inheritance, Encapsulation). As does every Java book. As does every Python book. Even books that claim to cater to the experienced or advanced programmer always recover these topics.

Of course, I've heard of projects like Rosetta Code, but that's not really what I'm looking for either. For one thing, there are only 87 examples, not even covering topics I'm really interested in. (An example of a topic I'd like to see is, "How to remove items from a collection based on a predicate?") Yes, it's wiki. Yes, I could go write the article myself. No thanks.

I guess what I really want to find are books that tell you the right way to perform tasks in a certain language, or why you would prefer one method over another. For example, in which situations should I prefer to use a vector instead of a map? (I'll give you a hint, even in key-value situations there are reasons to sometimes prefer a vector to a map).

For example, let's say I'm writing a new piece of C++ code. Should I use the stl? Almost always. Is there a good logging subsystem out there that I could use to avoid rewriting a new one? Are there any libraries I should avoid? Boost.

I don't need to relearn why I should write objects or what should go into an object. Tell me how to define an object, how to use inheritance, how abstraction is implemented. Give me actual, realistic costs of making design tradeoffs. For example, how much will it cost me to call a virtual function? Is there a way I can mitigate this inside of a single class, if I really know what the type of the class is?

I'm sure, one of these days, someone will get it. Till then, I'll just continue to suffer in silence.

Thread-safe printing in Python

Recently, a coworker was having issues printing from multiple threads in his python program.

After a little googling, I came upon this discussion which covered this exact topic.

At the lowest level, python appears to be threadsafe wrt a single file handle, which is good. Unfortunately, when you use the print statement, an implicit '\n' is added for you, and this apparently results in a second low-level write call, which is a seperate mutex grab.

As a result, you often get lines of text that look like this:

This text comes from Thread 1.This text comes from Thread2.
< Empty Line >
This text comes from Thread 1.This text comes from Thread2.
< Empty Line >

In this situation, you basically have two choices. You could replace your print statements with a custom written print function that grabs a mutex and adds a trailing '\n', or you could use the logging module. Even though the threadsafe print module is very short, I'd still suggest that the 'right thing' to do here is to just use the logging module.

When you decide in the future that you want to log to a tcp connection on another server, your future self will pat yourself on the back that you just used logging up front.

Cheers,

Olivier could be a Visual Studio Installer Model

One of my fellow nvidians, Olivier, writes in his blog Mutable Conclusions. Prominently on his website, he features a picture of himself. I've included a copy here:



I've teased him about this mercilessly, but I think his picture would've been a perfect include in the Microsoft Visual Studio installer. Judge for yourself.

I'm a comic!

A friend of mine is a (yet undiscovered) great artist. She does phenomenal 2-D work, and keeps up a daily sketch site. I only recently discovered her site, but I was excited to see that I'd been rendered as a comic.

I feel the representation is fairly accurate.