Posts

Couple my usual reluctance to post here with work on a new all-consuming project, and you have a recipe for potentially long periods of silence. Yesterday, I posted an announcement of the availability of the first chapter of the Mercurial manual to the mailing list. You can read the first chapter here (PDF only thus far); it documents Mercurial Queues, which I’ve enthused about at length in front of several audiences recently. ...

I’m about to embark on a documentation project, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the tools I’d ideally like to use for the job. Previously, when I’ve done a lot of writing, it’s been with LaTeX, or on rare, painful, occasion with a word processor or dedicated tech pubs tool like FrameMaker. What I like about using a text-based markup language is the ability to use normal revision control tools to see the evolution of what I’ve been doing. Ignoring any issues surrounding whether word processors are more or less appropriate than feeding text markup into a compiler, trying to use revision control tools with opaque word processor files is pointless, as I get no information more useful than a blob; trying to use the internal change-tracking features of word processors is worse. ...

The weekend in London, now almost a week past, was sufficiently intense that I didn’t have the energy to write it up as I went along, or indeed to write much of anything about it until now. Of course we didn’t come to any conclusions about one project subsuming the other, but we did gain a better understanding of where our respective projects stand relative to each other. The sprint lasted three days. We spent much of the first day talking about how we got to where we are; how did people get interested in revision control, why and how they started contributing to their respective projects, and so on. The second day involved more discussions of details, while thinking in terms of how we could do things that benefited each project individually while assisting both. A few prospects, for example, were a common format for exporting metadata to the likes of GUIs, and a common plugin framework. The third day was much less structured; we showed off interesting bits of functionality, hacked a little, and talked about whatever topics were interesting at the time. ...

I’m giving a talk on Mercurial at Baypiggies, the San Francisco Bay Area Python user’s group, tomorrow evening at 7:30pm. If you’re a local Mercurial user and we haven’t met, please feel free to come along. If you don’t use Mercurial, you’re welcome to attend and see what it’s all about.

A few weeks ago, Mark Shuttleworth showed up on IRC, and invited several core developers from the Mercurial and Bazaar-NG to visit London, on Canonical, Ltd’s shilling. The purpose of the joint visit is to discuss possible points of collaboration between the two projects. I got to come along as gadfly-in-chief, or filler-of-the-bug-database, or some such thing, but I am writing this entry from London, and the sprint will kick off tomorrow morning. Each project is already actively snarfing code from the other. For example, Alexander Schremmer’s lovely branchview work lets you view the branch and merge history of a Mercurial repository, graphically, from within a regular web browser. It uses code from Bazarr-NG’s bzrk plugin to do the abstract graph rendering. On the other side, Goffredo Baroncelli has ported Mercurial’s built-in web server to run on top of bzr. ...

While it may appear that I gave up blogging over the nonsense a few months ago with Larry, in fact I’ve been otherwise occupied for over two months now. (This post originally included a photo of Baby R bundled in a blanket, but the image is no longer available.) The fact that the above picture is the most recent I’ve had a chance to upload should speak volumes. While R is the most excellent baby ever (excepting his big brother), taking care of him has kept us … busy. Couple his arrival with my indifferent attachment to blogging in the first place, and you have the perfect recipe for months of silence.

Here follows the text of a message I posted to the Mercurial mailing list earlier today. As I mentioned the other day, I will not be contributing to Mercurial development for a while. Several people have asked me why. At my workplace, we use a commercial SCM tool called BitKeeper to manage a number of source trees. Last week, Larry McVoy (the CEO of BitMover, which produces BitKeeper) contacted my company’s management. ...

I am pleased to announce the availability of a standalone Windows version of Mercurial 0.7 (plus extra bits), packaged as a self-extracting installer. Benefits of this package: No prerequisites! You don’t need Python installed to use Mercurial any longer, because it’s a Windows executable. You can’t even tell that Mercurial is a Python application! Uses standard Windows installer/uninstaller wizards that everyone is familiar with. The download is just 2.5MB in size, but is fully featured. Comes with complete post-install configuration instructions. If your system uses NTFS filesystems, we use hardlinks to clone local repositories, saving time and disk space. Here’s the download link: https://mercurial-scm.org/install ...

A few months ago, I grew sufficiently tired of wading through the enormous quantities of spam I was receiving (about a thousand junk emails per day) that I decided to experiment with a technique called greylisting to see if it would reduce the amount of junk email I received. My first choice was a program called postgrey, but when I tried to install it, I realised that my mail server box was running a version of Postfix that couldn’t work with postgrey. ...

One of those myths about distributed revision control systems that has grown legs and acquired a heartbeat is that they make forking a project easier. To the uninitiated, a “fork” occurs when some contributors to a project get disgruntled and decide to take the code, make their own changes, and start a new project based on the existing one. Forking is a fairly common occurrence. It happens every few years to the BSD operating systems; it happened to GCC in the late 1990s; and it happened to Emacs almost fifteen years ago. ...