andymatuschak.org: Sparklings

This has been a long time coming.

I’ve just finished a monster refactoring to Sparkle which will hopefully keep it maintainable for the foreseeable future.

Sparkle now performs updates using drivers—you can see the current varieties on the left. This has let me take SUUpdater from about 1000 lines to 200. All the cases for different update methods are now handled through inheritance.

Along the way, I’ve cleaned everything up and made things as simple as possible. I finally feel like between this and the SUInstaller refactoring, I can actually stand to work on this project.

Anyway, with this comes a great big warning: this is not ready for primetime yet. Please, please test this revision with your app and let me know what you think (even if it’s just to say “everything’s great!”). If we don’t hear anything terrible in a week or two, we’ll say it’s good to go.

More changes may be forthcoming; you probably shouldn’t fork or subclass things for a while. And check out the (somewhat) more detailed changelog here.

Launching with LaunchPad

On another note, I’m planning to move Sparkle the hell away from Trac and SVN, both of which drive me nuts. I need a branching RCS to be efficient as a maintainer.

My current plan is to use LaunchPad because it has bug tracking integrated as well, which means using Bazaar. I may also end up using LaunchPad’s translation and idea-tracking features, which could be neat.

Is this a terrible idea? Should I be moving somewhere else? Git seems promising, but I kind of need an end-to-end project management solution like LaunchPad or Trac. And I’m not paying for Lighthouse—Sparkle has a budget of $0.