Posts

Chris Mason has been working on a very useful extension to Mercurial called Mercurial Queues, or mq for short. It has languished in semi-obscurity for a while on SuSE’s ftp servers, so we’ve made a repository available for people to pull from directly. Several years ago, Andrew Morton published some scripts that he used to manage patches to the Linux kernel. These got turned into a set of tools called quilt. The quilt tools are popular among developers who need to maintain a set of changes to a changing source tree over a long period of time, without integrating those changes into the main source tree. ...

I had a chance encounter with Brad Neuberg today, who is trying to get a part-time coworking arrangement off the ground. The idea is that if you do one of those nebulous “new economy” jobs that involves dinking on a laptop in a coffee shop for endless hours, it can be a welcome relief to impose a bit of structure on work sometimes. I’ve talked to several people before who found the idea appealing, but Brad has gone a step farther and found a space, made arrangements to occupy it two days a week, and started recruiting people to try to make it work. ...

I gave a talk on distributed SCMs at Foo Camp last weekend. The slides were originally posted as a PDF, but the file has since disappeared. The talk was an overview of the current state of the Free Software distributed SCM world; I didn’t concentrate on any one system. The talk was surprisngly (to me) well attended, particularly given its fairly obscure topic and the competition from many other insanely entertaining sessions scheduled at the same time. Most of the audience were CVS or Subversion users, although Bram Cohen (who hacks on Codeville) and an SVK developer whose name I do not recall were there, too. ...

Ian Bicking has written two thoughtful articles on distributed and centralised revision control systems (the first, the second). His original thesis was one that he shared with Greg Hudson, one of the Subversion developers: for free software, distributed SCM bad, centralised good. He had four main points, which I have reduced to three: 0 Work ought to be visible to other developers, and easy to find. 0 It should be easy to understand the changes made. 0 It ought to be simple to integrate changes. ...

[I originally posted this about two weeks ago, but something caused it to disappear. Here’s a lightly edited repost.] Karl Fogel posted a comment on my future of free distributed SCM systems entry, asking for some more detail on what it is that I don’t like about Subversion. That’s a tall order. Since Karl is one of the primary authors of Subversion, I can’t just go making wild scattershot accusations. Well, I suppose I could, and I did, in that earlier posting. But now for some actual information, or at least opinions posing in that form. ...

Zooko has written a clever article comparing Darcs’s merge strategy with Subversion’s. The essence of the article is a case where two edits to the same file in different branches cause Subversion to automatically do a merge that introduces a bug, while Darcs gets the merge right. Out of curiosity, I tried Zooko’s test case with BitKeeper and Mercurial. BK got the merge right (as I expected), while Mercurial punted and dropped me into a manual merge tool. ...

It has now been a month since BitMover withdrew BitKeeper from use by people who didn’t have paid licenses. Ian Bicking has written a blog entry on the evils of distributed revision control, so this seems a good time to talk about the legacy of BitKeeper. Early during the use of BK for Linux kernel development, Greg Hudson wrote a polemic entitled Why BitKeeper Isn’t Right For Free Software. He had two main points: ...

One of our tenants is about to move out of her apartment in San Francisco. While we wait for the City to digest our plans to build a new house, we have two mortgages to pay; one on the house we live in, and one on the empty lot that, if pressed, maybe we could camp in. It’s not as satisfying as you might think to watch a lot of money fly out the door every month, especially as most of it is interest. ...

Overheard in San Francisco. -So what have you been doing? -I was in the Marines for five weeks. -Five weeks? What happened? -Well, I’m not there now.

Since the last month has been quite thoroughly insane, I have only just gotten around to installing Fedora Core 4 on my desktop and laptop. So far, I have been quite impressed. GNOME didn’t keel over and die on me after the upgrade, though it briefly behaved in a peculiar manner on the laptop. I am so used to destroying all of my GNOME configuration data so it can get its knickers unwrapped after an upgrade that I was pleasantly surprised by this. How low my expectations have fallen! ...