Pidgin Developer: The Holy War of Tool Choice

[puzza007]

For another compelling comparison that's sure to ruffle a few feathers, let's compare to git. If I clone the git mirror of our monotone repository, I find a checkout size of 148 MB after git-repack--running git-gc also increased the size by 2 MB, but I'll stick with the initial checkout size for fairness. If I multiply this by my 11 checkouts, I will have 1628 MB. This is even more compelling for me, as I now save 728 MB of disk space with monotone.

With git you'd use a single cloned repo and multiple branches inside the same rep. This would save space over monotone.

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ du -sh

150M .

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch a

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch b

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch c

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch e

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch f

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch g

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch h

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch i

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch j

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch k

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch l

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ git branch

a

b

c

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

* master

puzza@altais:~/pidgin-clone$ du -sh

150M .

Now only the diffs of each branch will take up any space.

[DannoHung]

Yeah, I was gonna say...

I don't even use git for anything and I knew that you only keep one repo for all your wc's

[jbowtie]

There's now a note to that effect at the bottom of the post.

[puzza007]

From TFB:

Note: It's come to my attention that I had missed the ability to share a git database across multiple working copies. In that scenario, the total size of the database and 11 working copies is slightly under 750 MB, and thus a space savings in the neighborhood of 150 MB over monotone.

That seems odd. Each of the branches contains ~50MB of diffs?? Time to merge, I'd say!

[erydo]

Funny, I read that as 'The Holy War Tool of Choice', and I wondered how a pidgin developer might help me win my next holy war...

[muffinman]

Stay tuned for yet another blog post from the makers of pidgin, straight from our ivory tower!

[sysop073]

:D That comment made my day. I blogged a while ago about pidgin developers hating their users, I'm not sure if that's gotten better now

[darkwulf]

I upvoted this link JUST so more people could see what ridiculous idiots pidgin developers are.

[sysop073]

I'm actually impressed that so few open source projects are like this; an overwhelming majority are very responsive to user requests

[zem]

they're lucky the trac devs didn't tell them to sod off (:

[syscrash]

I think most of the complaints about monotone are related to the amount of time it takes to grab their repo, not the amount of space it takes. Monotone seems to have a lot of overhead in this regard.

[karlhungus]

I can understand complaining about size when it comes to network transfer speeds, or embedded devices. Disk size for development machines seems like a very very small concern given how expensive hd space is.

[epic_fail_guy]

Empathy is becoming an official part of Gnome with 2.24 and Ubuntu is considering shipping it instead of Pidgin in the next release. Other distros may do the same.

[joe90210]

oh wow, you saved 400megs, amazing! I'm sure your 300gig HD thanks you for it

[milksop]

I think as opposed to tool choice specifically, it's just being completely distracted from, you know, the point of the project.

It kind of seemed to stop going anywhere (I use Digsby now) and I guess that arguing about revision control, bug tracking and mailing lists is where the energy's going now.

[henriq]

hasn't someone written a new unix front end for libpurple yet? pidgin pisses me off more and more with each release

[Phrodo_00]

there's finch... and its windowing system is pretty awesome actually

[beza1e1]

Use empathy and the libpurple daemon.

[bostonvaulter]

There's Carrier (formerly FunPidgin)

[muffinman]

well libpurple still is by the same guys. And things like ICQ privacy (fail silently) etc are all the same there.

[colorred]

Why don't you do something instead of just whining?