Lion’s Bugs

Pierre Igot:

Ever since I upgraded to Lion last summer, I’ve been dealing with the usual, seemingly unavoidable collection of bugs that each and every major OS upgrade brings. What has been particularly irritating about the phenomenon this time around is that today, six months and several incremental OS updates later (we are currently at Mac OS X 10.7.3), most of these problems are still there, and there is no indication that Apple is taking them seriously enough that we can expect them to be fixed soon.

Although I’ve not been pleased with some of Lion’s user interface changes, and there are lots of bugs related to new features like Versions and the sandbox, in general use it has been mostly solid and reliable for me. It was perhaps the smoothest of any Mac OS X upgrade I’ve done. And it definitely seems more stable than Snow Leopard, the ostensibly more minor upgrade. However, general comments from my customers are more along the lines of Igot’s experience. Some people see Lion as Apple’s Vista: not a very compelling upgrade, a lot of stuff doesn’t work right, and they wish they’d sat out this round.

Git at Facebook Scale

Joshua Redstone (via Hacker News, which has some interesting comments):

The test repo has 4 million commits, linear history and about 1.3 million files. The size of the .git directory is about 15GB, and has been repacked with 'git repack -a -d -f --max-pack-size=10g --depth=100 --window=250'. This repack took about 2 days on a beefy machine (I.e., lots of ram and flash). The size of the index file is 191 MB.

Sam Vilain:

With the hard–working part of git on the other end of a network service, you could back it by a re–implementation of git which is written to be distributed in Hadoop. There are at least two similar implementations of git that are like this: one for cassandra which was written by github as a research project, and Google's implementation on top of their BigTable/GFS/whatever. As the git object storage model is write–only and content–addressed, it should git this kind of scaling well.