Tag: Git

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Apache Allura is an open source repo/project management system

Apache Allura is an open source implementation of a software “forge”, a web site that manages source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more for any number of individual projects.

Source: Apache Allura™ / Wiki / Home

Looks like it could be a good alternative for folks looking for something that is not Github to help manage code and projects. Written Python, uses MongoDB as its dbm, search is SOLR powered.

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Want to disrupt the legal industry? How about some block chain tech?

Millions of developers use Git on a daily basis and rely on commit hashes to create an ordered guarantee of history. However, Git users must manually choose who they trust to update commit changes.

However, imagine the following scenario:

  1. Thousands of transactions, or pieces of data are being recorded each second.
  2. All of that data can be committed to a Git repository. Perhaps data can be batched together into a single commit.
  3. After recording thousands of commits, each containing thousands of transactions, a single hash, such as “f883f426c6da861bb31c5b5d645e638d44cb2c1f” is published each day.

This hash guarantees the integrity of all of the commits in the Git repository. The hash could be tweeted, or even published in a newspaper, guaranteeing an ordered history of events.

via Is Git A Block Chain? · Domus Tower.

I think block chain technology is one of the few truly innovative and disruptive technologies in the legal space. I mean let’s face it does law practice need another expert system, search engine, or  document assembler? All of that tech is decades old at this point and improvements are nice and useful but hardly disruptive. Block chain on the other is actually something pretty new that provides lots of interesting potential in the legal space.

Imagine following the scenario outlined above but instead of just uniquely identifying bits of code, you’re talking about legal documents. Contracts, leases, bills of sale, judicial opinions, briefs, opinion letters, statutes, regulations, complaints, answers, depositions all uniquely identified and identifiable in a block chain. That would be an actual innovation and would disrupt the entire legal system.

Work is starting in this area with some interesting papers already beginning to turn up on SSRN. If you’re truly interested in disrupting the legal industry quit looking at warmed over 20th century tech and focus on something truly new.

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Gerrit is a web-based code review tool built on top of the git version control system

Gerrit is intended to provide a light weight framework for reviewing every commit before it is accepted into the code base. Changes are uploaded to Gerrit but don’t actually become a part of the project until they’ve been reviewed and accepted. In many ways this is simply tooling to support the standard open source process of submitting patches which are then reviewed by the project members before being applied to the code base. However Gerrit goes a step further making it simple for all committers on a project to ensure that changes are checked over before they’re actually applied. Because of this Gerrit is equally useful where all users are trusted committers such as may be the case with closed-source commercial development. Either way it’s still desirable to have code reviewed to improve the quality and maintainability of the code. After all, if only one person has seen the code it may be a little difficult to maintain when that person leaves.

via Gerrit Code Review – A Quick Introduction.

This is like something that may be worth doing to help make sure at least one other person is looking over code before it gets committed. Deploying code that only one of us has ever seen is a bit of a problem around here especially when it fails.

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Git Large File Storage Extension Allows for Better Versioning of Large Files

Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.

via Git Large File Storage.

This could represent a solution not only for projects with large media assets, but also for doing things like keeping database dumps within a project. There is an API that lets you build a backend so you don;t need to use Github. The Reference server that uses the API is at https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server.