I can’t help but notice that two really important new pieces of developer infrastructure inside Sun have something in common. OpenJDK and lots of other pieces of the ecosystem are using Mercurial for source-code management. Then there’s the new OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (think apt). The thing is, they’re both in Python.
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From: Jeremiah Foster (Oct 17 2007, at 07:13)
I see a lot of git out there too. Well, more and more anyway.
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From: John Minnihan (Oct 17 2007, at 08:47)
The image accompanying this post (linked from the Mercurial front page) is hilarious:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2007/04/version_control_system_shootou_1.html
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From: Mark (Oct 17 2007, at 10:10)
Perhaps not too surprising since Sun's Update Connection Enterprise is implemented using Python. A few years ago Sun bought out a little company called Aduva whose product (developed using Python) was an automated system and patch management system (primarily for Linux but AIX and Solaris were later supported). This became the basis for Update Connection.
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From: Jilles van Gurp (Oct 17 2007, at 10:55)
There's this nice blogpost about distributed version control system adoption here: http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=79
Bottom line is that there are several relatively immature DVCS systems gaining in popularity lately but that some work remains to be done before they are ready for mainstream usage. Personally, I'm pretty happy using svn and svk occasionally for my small projects. Having maintained a somewhat larger project in subversion for a while, I can clearly see the benefits of DVCS. Merging in svn is great compared to CVS but still quite tedious. I can easily see it becoming a major headache for large source trees with hundreds of developers committing.
That's basically why commercial solutions are still actively used in large software companies like Nokia where I work. These systems suck in many ways but they get the job done. Our product teams have to juggle millions of lines of code in many branches (often country or operator specific) of many products with many versions. That's a challenge no matter what you use.
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From: Wes Felter (Oct 17 2007, at 12:02)
Python is taking over the open source system utility space. AFAIK, Fedora and Ubuntu both have policies to write such tools in Python unless there's a good reason not to. (Such policies are necessarily weak, given that most Fedora/Ubuntu developers don't work for Red Hat/Canonical and thus will follow their own interests -- which often lead to Python anyway.)
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From: Simon Willison (Oct 18 2007, at 03:48)
I'm constantly surprised and fascinated by the number of niches that Python is occupying these days. It's become the standard scripting language of the GIS industry, the 3D animation industry (Pixar and the like), the high energy physics community (CERN's new Large Hadron Collider makes extensive use of Python). The Scientific Python conference now attracts nearly as many people as the main Python conference.
It's showing up in more and more games and desktop apps as well (Civilisation 4, Paint Shop Pro...) - although it looks like Lua is doing extremely well in that area too.
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From: dr2chase (Oct 18 2007, at 07:29)
Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org) is also written in Python.
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