TortoiseCVS comes with bundled CVSNT binaries.
The older version(s) came with CVSNT 2.5.03, which turned out to have a security vulnerability.
The latest version (1.12.5) comes with CVSNT 2.5.05 that has several issues:
It nags with pop-ups that urge you to buy the commercial version.
It inserts advertisements into commit notes.
It has a bug that leaves Windows command-line consoles in a messed-up state.
The sources (GPL) are not easily obtainable.
Some references:
- What is going on with CVSNT?
- Batch scripts no longer work?
Recently, somebody posted this to the TortoiseCVS mailing list:
i found the sources and made the following fixes
version_fu.h - set the "suite" flag to avoid popups and advertisement
win32.cpp - saved the original codepage and restored it on exit
take it from http://www.mediafire.com/?ys93oh4bdj1auby
only the cvsnt.dll needs to be compiled
I downloaded the sources and tried compiling them. Unfortunately they seem to need quite a number of other packages (openssl, iconv, mysql, postgres, etc... I lost count) that are open source but still need to be hunted for...
Combined with my limited time and the lack of tools (I don't have VS2008) I gave up on the effort to build it myself.
I tried contacting the author of the message, but he is in a similar position (and does not use CVSNT anymore).
Contacting the TortoiseVCS maintainer also proved fruitless:
That is not a project I am going to undertake.
TortoiseCVS is very low on my list of priorities these days.
If anybody is willing to build the "fixed" CVSNT.DLL from the provided sources, and make it available, I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks,
Alex.
Sure - you can get it here - compiled in a single installer which includes TortoiseCVS and the latest CVSNT code with lots of bug fixes:
http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/features/tortoise/
The small fee we charge is to cover our costs of developing and distributing the software including the license fees for MSDN and financial contributions to related projects such as the TortoiseCVS project, Bugzilla project, FSF etc. etc. The source code is included in the price.
Remember that Free Software is about Freedom (like the Free Press) not about price:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Related
Very little has changed in a while for BIRT. Since the project seems still heavily used, it would be interesting to know if there are future plans and if so, what is entailed in those plans. Subsequently, based on the development status: Is BIRT still a safe platform to base development on or is it expected to just be conserved in the current state such that occuring bugs probably won't get fixed?
We decided to use BIRT instead of Jasper 8 years ago.
We are still using 4.2.1 for development and 4.3.0 for production runtime.
I reported several bugs since then and only very few of them got fixed.
Furthermore, I developed some patches to enhance the word emitter output - with no reaction from any one at all.
I also developed a patch to allow kind of a vertical tab (to place something at a fix y position on the page (but not in the page footer). With my previous experience of the community, I did not publish that one.
I can say that while the source code is quite easy to read, it is nevertheless almost impossible to understand what is actually going on, because the functions are extremely deeply nested.
My conclusion with 8 years experience of using BIRT for production:
PROS:
BIRT is very powerful and flexible, you can achieve some very cool results.
The quality of the resulting PDFs.
There are only very few things I miss and cannot work around.
The runtime engine is very stable and fast enough, very few problems.
The community is helpful.
CONS:
From an open-source perspective, it is one of the weakest projects I know of.
New versions tend to introduce more bugs than they fix.
Bugs, ideas and patches from the community seem to be ignored most of the time.
Lack of internal code quality and documentation.
Update Dec 2021:
BIRT is back again!
The open source project is quite busy (see answer by Alexander Fedorov) and every help is welcome.
It looks like there will be a new release soon.
Until then, building BIRT yourself (with Eclipse 2021-09 and Java 11) has become quite easy thanks to the common effort of the community.
Metadata and information about the health of an Eclipse project can be found on projects.eclipse.org:
The Birt project is still alive, but not as active as before:
there has been only one release per year since 2016 and
in the last three months there have been more than 20 commits from 11 contributors.
Like all open source projects, the success of the project depends on participation. Therefore, I encourage everybody to report bugs and propose changes to Birt and other open source projects.
Update: Good news, Eclipse Birt has been rebooted. It is under active development again, there have been more than 100 commits in two and a half months and the release 4.9.0 is scheduled for March 16, 2022.
The Eclipse BIRT project has been restarted recently, and we are working to prepare Eclipse BIRT 4.9 release.
Contributors are very welcome. Here is the brief instruction regarding steps how to join this effort: https://eclipse.github.io/birt-website/docs/community
Latest versions of BIRT are not available in maven.
Ubuntu is usually a cutting edge distro. But why does it stick to a 2011 version of Eclipse when we are 4 years into 4.x development?
It's not even optional and cannot be installed from the repositories. And it's not 'easy' from a download either. For some reason, the Java SE 7 reference implementation, OpenJDK, is not enough, and you need the Oracle version. Why? This isn't available from the repo's either, and you need some weird untrusted 3rd party repo for that or follow a whole chapter on how to install it yourself.
There were problems three years ago. When Juno 4.2 came out, it had a lot of performance issues. Eclipse Director Mike Milinkovich explains one of the reasons is lack of funding. For the first time in a major release:
"The performance test were turned off because the Eclipse platform team has a serious resource issue."
For that reason, developers released unnamed and unpromoted version 3.8 simultaneously with 4.2 to bridge the gap for this (hopefully) temporary problem, and it's popularity caused a notable trend downwards amongst developers. As one Eclipse b3 developer mentioned:
"I was stunned by the performance improvement after the switch. The 3.8 platform is much MUCH faster"
The 3.8 release is still a popular alternative to the 4.x branch among developers (ask my colleagues or google), I think mainly because of (genuine) trust issues. But the bridge (read: support for 3.8) has closed now that 4.3 is released.
The core problems (funding and developers) have not been fixed though, as seen by Google's gesture of donating money to the Eclipse Foundation in the hopes that other companies will follow suit. Does this mean that 4.3 is still not up to par with the 3.x standards?
This is not a problem with a plugin or a feature for a specific language, this is a problem within the core of the platform itself. (But I'm using WST with Javascript and V8 plugins for PHP and Node development in particular.)
This is not a specific platform problem either. There are similar complaints from Linux, Windows, and OSX users. (But I'm using Linux (Mint 13).)
On the one hand you have people telling the EOL for 3.8 "proves" that 4.3 is fine now. On the other hand (see comments):
"I've moved back to 3.8 due to constant crashes on ubuntu with 4.3"
3.8 is far from problem-free and I wouldn't mind to get a smoother development experience. So I am wondering, why is Eclipse 4 'kept from us' by the people who decide what software versions are 'good for us' (AKA what goes into the official repository)?
lucid (10.04 LTS)
Eclipse 3.5.2-2
precise (12.04 LTS)
Eclipse 3.7.2-1
raring (13.04)
Eclipse 3.8.1-1
saucy (13.10)
Eclipse 3.8.1-4
trusty (14.04 LTS)
Eclipse 3.8.1-5.1
utopic (14.10)
Eclipse 3.8.1-5.1
Update 2014-05-30: I just tried Kepler (again) and it still suffers from UI glitches out of the box. E.g.:
And no, changing the inactive window toolbar background color in preferences does not fix this. (Even if it would, this would be a silly default choice).
I would like to know, from someone who is not positively or negatively biased because of their own highly specialized and tweaked workflow - preferably from someone with experience in the Ubuntu package maintaining process for non-trivial packages - why this decision is made by a team of professionals who know what they are doing for the most widely used Linux distribution out there?
Eclipse Juno was released 2012-06-27. On 2012-07-17 a bug concerning the responsiveness of the UI was reported. Four months later, around 2012-11-14 the first patch was released to the official update-site.
Many users, however, completely missed the release of the patches. I assume the information drowned in the FUD, and other more important news, that was spread around that time. At the end of 2012 I posted an answer on SO. Apparently I was not the only one for whom the patch fixed this performance issue.
On 2013-02-22 Eclipse 4.2.2 was released, which contained the same patch, yet I kept receiving upvotes for my answer on SO until June.
Probably the only known fact among developers is that Eclipse had serious performance issues at some point. However, the knowledge about scope, magnitude and duration of these issues seems to me like a series of common misconceptions.
There was a four months period during which it was a good idea for many Eclipse users to stick with the 3.8 branch. I say "many" because I worked with 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 and it was O.K. for me. Subjectively, switching tabs was about two times slower and the IDE froze maybe once a day for a couple of seconds. For colleagues of mine the problem was much more severe. I assume it depended on your setup and on your workflow, however, I never felt like investigating further because I knew the platform developers were working on the issues, and there was a good fallback, using 3.8.
One year and three Eclpse releases later these serious performance issues are still fixed.
Of course, this doesn't mean that there are no more performance issues. As of now I find 1979 reports in the Eclipse bugzilla with the keyword "performance". This doesn't mean that Eclipse is very buggy, but only that it is very well documented and open. Whether or not you are affected by any of these issues, again, depends on the setup, the plug-ins you are using and your workflow. I am a Java, plug-in and EMF developer. I work with medium to big work spaces (~1M LoC), and Eclipse 4.3.1 is fast enough. The 3.8 release is not an option for me because as Eric said, it won't receive all of the important updates. People will still continue using it in the future. Many of them will also continue using Internet Explorer 5.5.
If you try the 4.x branch and notice any performance issues, please report them, but be specific about your setup.
From the official Wiki page:
Several major performance defects have been addressed in Juno SR2
(4.2.2). Community members have confirmed that these fixes
substantially address the performance problems with editor and view
opening, closing, and switching. These fixes are widely available in
Juno Service Release 2 (February 2013). All defects are also resolved
in the Kepler (June 2013) release stream.
new Features
Your statement "3.8 release was specifically released as a faster and more stable alternative to 4.2" is clearly incorrect; 3.x has gone into its 'end of life' maintenance and was most certainly not released as an alternative to 4.x.
While folks are welcome to continue to use the 3.x stream if it suits their needs please recognize that as the various projects move forward there will be significant divergence in the features available between the two versions...
I need to do some UML diagrams, and doing the work right in Eclipse by reverse engineering classes is the best/fastest approach for me. Taking advise found elsewhere on Stack Overflow, I'm playing with eUML2.
The problem I have is this... I installed the Studio demo, and it worked well for us. However, for now, I just need to do the class diagrams which are available in the free edition. So I uninstalled the studio demo, and installed the free. However, it still thinks I have the studio demo installed as the background of my diagrams has it in 24pt font, and in the top right of the page it says "* Evaluation *".
Reading around, I assume this issue is around the problem with the license file contained in the install of the free version... or the fact that it is missing from the free version.
Anyone here figured out the license file issue with eUML2? Where can I find a free license, or an install with the free license in it? Where is the license stored in my install? can I just kill it?
I could ask this question on the Soyatec forum, however this question has been asked a number of times, with no answers provided. Either they do not monitor their forums, or one must pay the 100€ price for support to get an answer.
The studio license is installing a file in your folder user/.eclipse/configuration/... If you erase this file then the tool will consider it is a new install of the software.
Having said that I would not recommend to use eUML because it is full of bugs and adding UML tags in your code. A real mess mixing code and model !!
For your information it seems to me that it is intentional not to answer to any question and stop the Soyatec company.
Don't forget that Soyatec is more or less a kind of Omondo spin off. 4 shareholders having created the omondo company left it with the code of EclipseUML 2005. I know that the tool is now totally different because being revamped by a new team but the architecture is still more or less the same.
Omondo Corp is currently being under acquisition by a large US software company and once the sell will completed it could be possible that they claim redundancy package, or company shares etc... to the main shareholder who sacked them few years ago. They have a split contract but it seems that it is not valid.
Just money, always money. This world is disguising :-)
is there a way to create a task/activity report (say a weekly report) off tasks managed with Mylyn? I've been using Rachota TimeTracker which allows me to create reports (in html format)
http://rachota.sourceforge.net/en/demo.html
I've just started using mylyn (our company uses Embarcadero JBuilder which is is based on Eclipse), but I don't see anywhere in the Eclipse or Embarcadero docs about reporting capabilities.
Is it possible? Is it possible to query activities worked on a prior week and report statistics out of it (management like reports, you know;) I'm sure it is, but I haven't been able to google it out.
Thanks.
You're in luck, Tasktop Pro (the supported version of Mylyn) has reporting. It allows you to:
View all task activity times for the previous day, week, and month
Manually adjust times as necessary to account for meetings and discussions
Submit your adjusted times, on tasks you select, to your task repository
Create reports in various formats
I'd recommend this short video which explains the reporting features in about 6 minutes.
David Shepherd
Tasktop Technologies
As you already know by now, the reporting functionality is included into commercial Tasktop product, which is developed by the same people who created Mylyn. So, obviously they are not interested to include some features into a free version. Now you have two options, either buy Tasktop, or develop your own extension for Mylyn. The task data is stored in reasonable simple xml file, so you not necessarily have to create an Eclipse plugin.
the reporting feature was stripped from the project when it used to be called mylar, in 2007, and since the project went commercial never came back to the open source mylyn for obvious reasons..
I found this simple perl script which outputs a pretty basic text only report, good enough for me.
http://rachaelandtom.info/mylyn-report
No takers? Not surprised since I can't find anything on the subject. For what's worth, there is an experimental task/activity report available for Mylyn with the sandbox jar. However, I could not get mine to work as I'm tied up with a JBuilder installation behind a firewall (and I can't download anything on the corp network that is not pre-evaluated... it sucks, I know.)
I'm going to have to experiment with the mylyn sandox at home, but it would be great if someone knows of an easier, more stable alternative.
What is the best version control system to implement with PowerBuilder 11.5?
If you have examples of how you have did branching/trunk/tags that would be awesome. We have tried to wrap our heads around it a few times and always run into problems because we use shared libraries such as PFC/PFE in multiple applications.
Right now we are only using PBNative, and it sucks.
The Agent SVN is a MS-SCCI Subversion plug-in works with PowerBuilder.
Here is a link that describes how to setup Agent SVN to work with PowerBuilder and Subversion.
We currently use Perforce and it's P4SCC plugin, which works very well. In fact, I'm sure I read somewhere that the guys at Sybase who write PowerBuilder, actually use Perforce themselves.
So, to be fair, let's start out by saying that while you're asking about version control, PBNative is source control. If you compare something that is intended to have more features than just keep two developers from editing the same piece of source, then yes, PBNative will suck. The Madone SL may be an incredible bicycle, but if you're trying to take a couple of laps around an Indy track, it will suck.
"Best" is a pretty subjective word. There are lots of features available in version control and configuration management tools. You can get tons of features, but you'll pay through the nose. StarTeam has some nice features like being able to trace a client change request or bug report all the way through to the changed code, and being able to link in a customized diff tool (which is particularly useful in PB). Then again, if cost is your key criteria rather than features, there are lots of free options that will get the job done. As long as the tool supports the Microsoft SCC interface, you should be OK.
There is a relatively active NNTP newsgroup that focuses on source control with PowerBuilder, which you can also access via the web. You can probably find some already-posted opinions there.
Many years ago I used Starteam to control PB applications. PowerBuilder needless to say is an outdated bear, and it has to export each and every object from its "libraries" into source control.
Currently our legacy PB apps have its libraries saved whole into Subversion, without any support for diff's etc.
We use Visual SourceSafe. We don't use PFC, but we do have libraries that are shared among several projects. Till now, each project was developed separately from the others, and so the shared libraries were duplicated. To have them synchronized, they were all shared at the VSS level. Lately we've reorganized our sources so all projects are near each other, and there's only one instance of the shared libraries.
VSS is definitively not the best source control system, to say the least, but it integrates into PB without the need of any bridges. PB has an inherent problem working with source control, so it probably won't make a very difference working with one instead of the other (at least from the PB point of view).
Now, on a personal note, I'd like to say PB 11.5 is a piece of sh*t. It constantly crashes, full of unbelievable UI nuisance and just brings productivity to its knees. It's probably the worst IDE ever created. Stay away if possible.
FYI: The new PB12 (PB.NET) will integrate with SCC systems so you can easily choose which source control system that you want to use. Since we basically have dropped PBLs (they are now directories) files can be checked in/out individually - even with a plain vanilla editor since files are now normal (unicode) text files.
StarTeam integrates so beautifully with the PB IDE. I used that combination at my previous company (PB9 and ST5.x) for several years. You should be managing your code at the object level - don't log the entire PBL into ST...
If you're having problems with that setup, hit me up offline. phoran at sybase dot com.
We use Merant Version Manager for older projects and TFS for newer work. The only issue we have is that TFS does not support keyword expansion and changing the 'read the flowerbox comments' attitude people have. Some folks are nervous about losing the inline versioning history.
We use StarTeam and have been very pleased with it. It combines bug tracking with version control. Unfortunately though we don't store our files on the object level. We just store the PBL files directly in source control. Anything that supports the SCC interface theoretically should work correctly in PowerBuilder.
PB9: We used PVCS but had stability problems with pbl corruption and also problems co-existing with later versions of Crystal Reports (dll conflict) so now we use PB9 with Dynamsoft's Source Anywhere Standalone. This system is more primitive; it is missing the more advanced features for promotion levels and for pulling out an older milestone version of all objects to make a patch build.
What we are looking for now is something which will allow more advanced "change management", to support promotion levels at the change level (rather than at the object level). Would it be better to use perforce, starteam, or (harvest change manager + HarPB), or something else? Any advice on these combinations would be greatly appreciated.
You can always use Plastic SCM with PowerBuilder through SCC. Plastic is pretty advanced in terms of graphics, tools, replica and so on, so it's always a good choice to keep in mind.