These guys don’t seem to have any more idea than most about how to manage database changes, but their product (or at least, the pdf of the glossy brochure) looks to have some really good tracking built in for deployments in both i-space and Windows-space. They claim that (for a small additional fee) you can track deployments all the way to the customer.

This is typical of a mainframe approach. The mainframe guys don’t have bajillions of PC customers, they have tens, or hundreds, or thousands of mainframe customers. Those are small enough numbers that it makes sense to talk about tracking them individually. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that mainframers have a more pragmatic approach to tracking deployments.

Thinking about how I could get my hands on a copy of MatchPoint (when I don’t own an IBM i-series) has led me to think some more about how to review a CM tool. I want to be able to write CM tool reviews, but I don’t want to write the kind of bunkum that you get from most 1500-word specials.

If you have any hands-on experience with MatchPoint, I’d love to hear from you — to get some real world feedback on their glossy brochure, if nothing else. And if you have ideas on how to review a CM tool, well, I’ll write something up in a separate post. Hold that thought.

The case study is here, and the technical details article is here.

I’m eventually going to incorporate LDM info as pages here on Doing Better. But for now I’m frantically editing the articles to try to improve their look — CMJ’s article import scripts really aren’t very good at handling a complex document.

First, the review. I’ve been contributing articles to CM Crossroads for a few years now, and I’ll likely keep doing it for more. I started out to do a couple of things simultaneously: practice writing, get my name in the public eye, generate some buzz for my consulting work, maybe write enough to collect into a book. I expect these are all the usual reasons that people contribute regularly to any industry forum, especially on the web.

Recently I asked Patrick Egan, the owner/operator of CM Crossroads and the CMC Media supporting company, what I could do to help. He asked me to review Guiffy’s SureMerge product. I figured that I owed it to him, since I had asked, but I wasn’t thrilled at writing a review. Too many reviews, IMO, are clueless reporters shuffling paragraphs taken from the company’s media kit. To me, a review needs to be thorough and it needs to cover as much of the product as is reasonably possible: a review means getting married to whatever you’re reviewing.

With that said, I figured that I’d jump on the bandwagon and get some glossy literature and push out a standard review, a la Software Development magazine (or just about any other trade rag: I’m only singling them out because I can remember their name). But I couldn’t do it. I started poking at Guiffy, and mapping out what I’d have to say about the various features, and then I got side-tracked.

A few weeks later, my eval license was expired and Patrick was prodding me about whether I was doing the review or not. I talked to my buddy Jesse (a smart guy, but not involved in the CM business—perhaps a doubly smart guy) about the product, and the press releases I had gathered. He pointed out that since the press releases were focusing on i18n stuff, maybe I should do the review in a foreign language or something.

That’s a great hook. Here’s a review of Guiffy SureMerge for CM Crossroads. Enjoy, folks, but be careful: ???????? ?? ??????? ?????! (“It’s written in Russian,” according to Babelfish.)

I decided to at least do some testing using foreign language files: I’d placate my conscience by checking the character-encoding claims in the press releases. That was my downfall. I got interested in the product, and in doing the tests, and the next thing you know I’ve got fourteen pages of text, diagrams, and screenshots, plus a list of bugs.

I wound up talking to Bill Ritcher, the owner/developer of Guiffy, via email. I don’t think that guy ever sleeps: I was up at three or four in the morning, so I’d send off a question in email. Then I’d have a response half an hour later.

Bill was very patient, and very knowledgeable about his product. It’s obvious that SureMerge is his product: he’s devoted to it the way that most companies want to make you believe they are devoted to whatever they’re doing.

[Trac]:

But *geez* is it a pain to install. I’m talking about the “simple case” here. Nothing fancy. Just get it running to see what it looks like. In this particular case, a buddy of mine had asked about it (I kept mentioning it, you see…) and I said “Go for it! Install it, play with it, see what you think.”

The problem, of course, is that the simple case isn’t the default case. Nobody who’s serious about doing any kind of web anything thinks that running a bare-bones CGI script is a good idea. You want SCGI, or FastCGI, or mod_python. Something, anything, to squeeze more performance out.

Unless you’re my buddy. And you’re not *at all* sure about this Python stuff. And it’s going on your laptop. And how much performance does one person need?

So I get a cross-country call, and spend some time tele-debugging. My first job after college was in phone support, and I did a lot of it while consulting for Continuus, so I’m still actually pretty good at it. Which is good, because playing around with [Apache][] configuration directives isn’t the most productive debugging session ever. Not that I’m comparing [httpd.conf][] to [sendmail.cf][] or anything, but *beep*–is my cell-phone battery dead already?

[Apache]:
[httpd.conf]:
[sendmail.cf]:

Well *that* doesn’t cut it, by half. So I do what any decent sort would do: since I convinced my buddy to give it a shot, I’ll just cobble up an httpd.conf file that my buddy can use and email it to him. Sounds easy enough, and Apache has enough “using alternate config file” support that it’s really no skin off my nose. All I have to do is:

* Install [Python][] 2.3.5 — \[DONE\]

* Install [Subversion][] — \[DONE\]

* Install [Subversion/Python Bindings][] — \[DONE\]

* Install [ClearSilver][] — \[DONE\]

* Install [PySqlite][] — \[DONE\]

[Python]:
[Subversion]:
[Subversion/Python Bindings]:
[ClearSilver]:
[PySqlite]:

Happily for me, all this downloading and installing is *already done*–because I’ve got Trac working on my own laptop, see. So while it seems like a long, boring, tedious march, in reality it’s “okay, what do I need to do differently?” And the answer is “nothing,” but it took me 5 hours to discover that. Because I *thought* I would just gen up a new `httpd.conf` file with an `ExecCGI` directive, maybe a `SetHandler`, some `ScriptAlias` voodoo, and I’ll have this baby done before the microwave popcorn is done.

I could tell you what I tried and what I thought. But I wrote a long post the other day. So I’m going to jump right to the chase:

“Buddy,” I says at the end, “you need to install [mod_python][].”

[mod_python]:

###   ###

It’s a quick little download. Once you’ve got it, there’s a separate section of the wiki discussing how to configure Apache+mod_python to work with Trac. There’s no magic. You just copy and paste and it works.

I honestly think that the Edgewall guys would be closer to taking over the world if they deleted any mention of using it in CGI mode. I did encounter two different [blogs][] during my frenzied Googling for `+python +cgi +apache +windows` in which hapless victims who went before me posted that they were surrendering. I suppose that should have been an immediate hint.

[blogs]:

I still love Trac. It looks great. It works great. It’s project-management friendly, with tickets automatically linked in to milestones. It is *not* metrics-friendly. It’s not something you construct complex queries on. You could add that stuff, but it would probably make the whole tool less fun to use. As it stands, though, it’s a great tool for a team of maybe 30 folks.

If only it were easy to try out.