{"id":3137,"date":"2015-12-06T08:04:22","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T13:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=3137"},"modified":"2015-12-06T08:04:22","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T13:04:22","slug":"learnings-from-swift-becoming-opensource","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2015\/12\/06\/learnings-from-swift-becoming-opensource","title":{"rendered":"Learnings from Swift becoming opensource"},"content":{"rendered":"

Swift<\/a> is now opensource<\/a>, and it’s interesting to see Craig Federighi talk about it<\/a>. This is Apple doing right, considering FaceTime is long overdue<\/a> to being an open standard. People are nitpicking on Apple\u2019s Open Source tagline<\/a>, but really, this is akin to nitpicking on Mark Zuckerberg donating 99% of his Facebook stock to his new limited liability corporation charity (key: don\u2019t look a gift horse in the mouth).<\/p>\n

Apple has chosen to put Swift<\/a> on Github, and they\u2019ve ensured that it wasn\u2019t just an initial commit, but you\u2019re seeing a lot of history. And it\u2019s the right choice clearly, for engagement \u2013 1,275 watching, 18,884 stars, 2,139 forks, 51 pull requests currently, but most interestingly a lot of accepted code. Even simple things along the lines of \u201cfixing typos\u201d (see commits<\/a>, eg.\u00a0d029f7e5ae84cf8f6c12907f9ed0ac0a694881aa<\/a>, e8b06575d26a684f415af95143ec576a6aa5168d<\/a>, etc.).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Swift has open source documentation<\/a> \u2013 like all good open source projects are supposed to have. They use Sphinx<\/a>\u00a0and its in the source tree. This is something I\u2019d wish to see from MySQL (docs copyright Oracle, online<\/a>, but you can take it offline too via PDF) or MariaDB (friendly licensed Knowledge Base<\/a>), but so far only Percona Server has gotten this right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What else did Swift do right? Focus on user contributions \u2013 the Contributing<\/a> page is a breath of fresh air. And don\u2019t forget the code of conduct<\/a> for participating in the project.<\/p>\n

But besides just the documentation and contribution pages, I learned something new from one commit<\/a> in particular \u2013 the existence of nproc<\/tt><\/a>, part of coreutils<\/tt>. I immediately hopped onto IRC to chat with Nirbhay<\/a> (our resident\u00a0MariaDB Galera Cluster expert), because in scripts\/wsrep_sst_xtrabackup.sh<\/tt>, we do this via a get_proc()<\/tt> function. We should be focusing on modernising\/standardising our codebase, shouldn\u2019t we?<\/p>\n

There is a lot we at\u00a0MariaDB Corporation<\/a> and the\u00a0MariaDB Foundation<\/a> can learn from Swift being opensource and how Apple deals with the community at large. Here\u2019s hoping we get the best practices from it and implement it in due time.<\/p>\n

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