a convenient truth

In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management.

UI prototyping.

This utility, isolate, runs processes in a chroot-ed environment, with constrained resource limits, as a random UID, and with limited access to the X server. An isolated program ("isolatee") no longer has all the authority of your user account, but you can still enjoy its legitimate functionality. You can play even maliciously-crafted songs in an unsafely implemented music player, with greatly minimized risk to your other data.