Month: September 2008

msysgit installer is broken on vista

OK, it isn’t exactly broken, it just doesn’t know about vista’s virtual path features. This means you can run the exe as a non-admin user and it does not get installed properly.

The work around is to not run the installer as a regular use and wait for UAC to invoke itself. It never will. Instead, save the .exe file and right click on it and choose "Run as administrator…"

Now the program will actually get installed to C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) instead of the virtual are c:\Programs\data\user\blah\wahterver\it\is\vista\has\some\crazy\features.

Why am I using GIT? Well, unfortunately because I have to. Cloning was easy enough but just typing git help or git help clone and I immediately miss the polish of bazaar. The "I have to" is in reference to the no longer ignorable myriad of projects now hosted at github. IMNSHO all of these should have opted to be hosted a launchpad. But as we have seen in the past in technology, the best solutions don’t always win. Sometimes the solution with the loudest voice wins. (VHS>Beta?) (DAT>DCC?) (Blueray>HDDVD?)

Lack of Value of Code Metrics

I was just reading blogs and stumbled across this gem:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/08/26/nhibernate-2-0-changes-overview.aspx

Patrick ran NDepends (an awesome static analysis tool) on the 2.0 release of NHibernate.

Patrick went on to suggest that the NHibernate code base was spaghetti because its internal namespaces are cross dependant. Having looked at the NHibernate code base, I disagree. In fact as a base for learning more about programming by reading others source code, I have found NHibernate to be an excellent source of learning.

I tried to post this as a comment, but I couldn’t (maybe my Opera browser, or lack of JS?).

“IMHO, the NHibernate team should fix this problem asap”

I can fix it easily, just flatten out the namespaces. Put EVERYTHING into the NHibernate namespace and this wouldn’t be a problem.

Is this the right thing to do?  NO!  But it does fix your metric.  So I assert that your metric is wrong.

Who care if namespaces are cross dependent?  I don’t. Namespaces are for logical groupings of behaviors. If your behaviors are cross dependent, so will your namespaces.

This metric may be useful in a typical 3 tiered layered business application. NHibernate is not that. It is one ORM library. ONE. I do not find your metric useful.

 

Given any metric that you are using (P/E ratio for stocks anyone?) please be aware of what that metric actually means and consider its value in that specific case. Yes, you must reconsider each metric on a case by case basis.