Re: Last gasp

Alex wrote:
> Jay Levitt<jay.levitt@gmail.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 It runs on an outdated version of Rails (2.3) but only because Rails is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So: withdrawn.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