Submitted by “Due to being dissatisfied with the inability of existing open source Continuous Integration solutions to prevent developers from abusing the codebase, I’ve been prototyping a new proactive approach to Continuous Integration. Sin, a framework for Continuous Integration, is the result of this work. I discuss the problems with existing solutions and the advantages of Sin here.”
Is the name such a good idea?
I guess we’re all sinners then anyway.
Actually, the name used to be SvnIntegration, but I thought it was too long, so I renamed it to Sin.
Man…I was thinking the topic might be numerical methods. I was curious because I’m always looking for a better way to integrate (although continuous functions are easier to integrate so that added to my curiousity).
I click on the link and all I get to learn about is catching bugs. Bah Humbug!
The decision makers in my organization already complain about the name of subversion, which at least I can explain away as a bit of an SCM play on words. There is no way I am going to introduce them to Sin, even though its functionality seems to be something that would benefit us in a number of areas. Shame, really.
Do you work for a bunch of god fearing weaklings?
I work for a public company, which I am sure contains a good number of god-fearing weaklings, in addition to a good number of godless heathens. The point is, a project like this will never gain corporate acceptance with a name like that. It won’t. I guarantee it.
Now, as for myself, I am a huge fan of sinning. I do it all the time and have no problems with either the word or the concept.
If this was something that wasn’t so obviously geared towards professional software development, I would understand. An MP3 player named sin? Fine.
I spend every day of my life pushing OSS on people that are openly hostile to it for various reasons. I am not going to risk potentially undoing all of the progress that I have made by pushing Sin on them, as much as I think it would be a perfect fit for us.
Oh well.
Well, calling God fearing people as weaklings shows ignorance and arrogance to The_One_That_We_All_Owe_Everything_Including_Every_Breath
Anyone knows Oxygen cost per day in Hospital?
Off topic, I know.
I myself have no problem with the name of the project.
Well, tell them you are installing the “Continuous Integration Framework” and be done with it.
Sure, the RPM says sin-whatever, but who the heck looks at that if not us nerds who don’t give a damn.
In most corporate environments, the person who introduces software is not the person who packages the software, who in many cases doesn’t even know the people who will be designing individual implementations of each software package for different development groups.
Somewhere along the line, someone will realize that it isn’t called “Continuous Integration Framework,” despite my insistence that it is.
I suppose everyone at your company avoids usage of the mathematical function sin also.
Well, if they have a clue, they know that the mathematical function sin() is actually short for SINE. Along with cos() for cosine, and tan() for tangent.
I understand what you are saying, though, and agree that if it is explained to people OR enough time is allowed, people that would be offended will get over heir initial reaction. The other poster’s point is that most companies do not wish to offend anyone in the FIRST PLACE. There are a lot of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim people in the world you know. I don’t think followers of any other religion or nonreligion would care.
–JM
Then definately don’t introduce them to Canada. Everyone that works here has a SIN (Social Insurance Company).
Also, don’t introduce them to Unix or MicroSoft (both of which has obvious sexual connotations) or Colgate (which means go hang yourself in Spanish) or Mono (which is monkey in Spanish, but it doesn’t matter, it’s a disease in English), or dial 911 for help because that will only encourage terrorists or …..
Sometimes words are just words. There’s a great deal of wisdom in the the following lines from “Through the looking glass”:
‘When I use a word,’ said Humpty Dumpty with contempt, ‘it has the exact meaning that I choose, no more no less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words have so many different meanings.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘who is the master – that’s all.’
I think another issue with the name, is that in a corporate environment that is hostile to OSS, silly names just come across as unprofessional and immature. That is was the first reaction I had, and I know some very anti-OSS folks that will have a field day with it.
The key thing, words are neutral, context is everything.
To me, SIn is Subversion Integration. To your company it appears to mean deeds inspired by the devil.
To me, Subversion means literally sub-version or a minor version increment. That’s a perfectly good name for a version control system. To the old “Underground Railroad” or the old “Soviet Underground Free Press” or the “French Resistance in WWII” or “Winston in the novel 1984” subversion means freedom fighting, democracy, and respect for human life. To your company it appears to mean thugs and organized crime.
The Chuck Berry song title “My ding a ling” and every word and phrase of the song only talk abouts silver bells on a string that the singer recieved as a gift. Is that the real meaning of the song?
Which meaning is “correct”? Let’s look at the SIN web site, mailing lists, and project interviews. Do they promote devil worship? Nope, just boring testing integration. How about subversion? Do they promote freedom fighting or organized crime? Nope, just boring version control.
From the context of “My ding a ling” and all the Chuck Berry interviews, it’s obvious that it’s not just a song about a childhood toy.
To me, the immaturality and lack of professionalism doesn’t come from the word, it comes from deliberately ignoring the context and colouring the word with one’s own prejudices. True maturity and professionalism comes from seeing things as they are and respecting the people you deal with.
None of this may apply to you personally, but I imagine there are a lot of immature people in your company and hence your frustration.
The thing is, immature people can take anything out of context. For instance, see the last quote on this page:
http://www.familyguyquotes.com/characters/brian-quotes.html
Quagmire’s immature but funny reactions, turned perfectly innocent comments about cleptomania into comments about sex.
The only thing you can do with immature people is to maintain your professionalism and maturatiy. Eventually they give up because “you’re no fun”.
This mode of operation almost follows when using a distributed SCM. Each developer is always working on their own branch, so someone must do the integration for new base-lines. Like SIN, this avoids problems with developers checking in code which breaks everything, but might work better since these SCMs are designed to work this way.
This is partly true, but you said “someone” must do the integration. The whole point of making it automated is to reduce mistakes and reduce the work load on humans. Humans are not fully debugged yet so they tend to make mistakes. Developers are also quite expensive. Hardware is rather cheap compared to a developer’s salary. Another reason for making it automated is that it allows for all sorts of pre- and post-processing of changes made to the codebase. A feature that I have planned for Sin is code coverage. This would enable Sin to perform all sorts of security checks (e.g. checks for correct releasing of memory or locks) on the source code before allowing the changes into the codebase.
When two developers have conflicting changes, SIN, as far as I understand it, will take the first check-in, leaving the second developer with a mess to clean up. This will happen without regard to the quality, scope, or correctness of either developer’s changes. This, in my opinion, will be the real sin.
When you have multiple developer branches, you need a human arbitrator/integrator to make these choices, even if the non-conflicting code integration is automated.
I’m not sure what you mean by “with a mess to clean up”. Sin ensures that no conflicts occur by locking the files touched by a change during processing of the change. If a developer tries to commit a change that is modifying one or more of the same files as another change also being processed, then the developer is asked to hold off the commit until Sin has finished processing the first change. This is comparable to exclusive or reseved checkouts of some SCMs. There is a more detailed explanation in http://sin.tigris.org/files/documents/3002/25217/Sin-0.1.pdf.
but where did it come from ?
are the authors all from english speaking countries ?
does anyone here remember the Commodore VIC of the early eighties ?
it was a success worldwide at the time, except they had to change name in Germany, coz I thing VIC means shit there.
or some other word that would people off paying for it
The name Sin comes from Subversion INtegration.