Archive for October, 2006

Stacked GIT 0.11

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
From: “Catalin Marinas” <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:08:31 +0100
Stacked GIT 0.11 release is available from http://www.procode.org/stgit/. StGIT is a Python application providing similar functionality to Quilt (i.e. pushing/popping patches to/from a stack) on top of GIT. These operations are performed using GIT commands and the patches are stored as GIT commit objects, allowing easy merging of the StGIT patches into other repositories using standard GIT functionality.
Read more at LWN.net.

GIT 1.4.3, GIT 1.4.3.1 Released

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:53:22 -0700
The latest feature release GIT 1.4.3 is available at the usual places: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ User visible changes, other than bugfixes, since v1.4.2.4 are: - upload-tar is deprecated but not removed; we now have upload-archive –format=tar and –format=zip instead. - ftp:// protocol is supported the same way as http:// and https:// - git-diff paginates its output to the tty by default. If this irritates you, using LESS=RF might help. - git-cherry-pick does not leave often useless “cherry-picked from” message. - git-merge-recursive was replaced by a rewritten implemention in C. The original Python implementation is available as “recursive-old” strategy for now, but hopefully we can remove it in the next cycle. - git-daemon can do name based virtual hosting. - git-daemon can serve tar and zip snapshots. - many gitweb tweaks and cleanups. - git-apply –reverse, –reject. - git-diff –color highlights whitespace errors. - git-diff –stat can be taught to use non-default widths. - git-status can use colors. - many more commands are built-in.
and two days later:
The latest maintenance release GIT 1.4.3.1 is available at the usual places: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ This is primarily to work around changes in the recent GNU diff output format. Also it contains irritation fix for “git diff” which now paginates its output by default.
Read more at LWN.net (update).

Martin Fowler: PervasiveVersioning

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Martin Fowler writes about Apple Time Machine, which is an attempt to give something like version control to ordinary users. He advocates the idea that more and more applications for non-developers could incorporate some aspects of version control, especially for collaboration needs.
So my hope that is that Time Machine will spur development of applications that are aware of versioning and can take advantage of it, which will in turn shift to more effective collaboration.
Read more at Martin Fowler: “Pervasive Versioning” and “More Version Control”.

monotone 0.30 released

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
From: Nathaniel Smith <njs-AT-pobox.com> Subject: [ANNOUNCE] monotone 0.30 released Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 16:16:46 -0700
The monotone team is pleased to announce the release of monotone 0.30, available, as always, from http://venge.net/monotone with more binary packages appearing there as they are built. The release notes for this release are: Sun Sep 17 12:27:08 PDT 2006 0.30 release. Speed improvements, bug fixes, and improved infrastructure. Several internal data formats have changed with this release; migration is straight-forward, but slightly more complicated than usual: — The formats used to store some cached data in the database have changed. To upgrade your databases, you must run: $ mtn -d mydb.mtn db migrate $ mtn -d mydb.mtn db regenerate_rosters — The metadata stored in _MTN in each workspace has been rearranged slightly. To upgrade your workspaces, you must run $ mtn migrate_workspace in each workspace. All of these operations are completely lossless, and 0.30 remains compatible with earlier versions with regards to netsync.
Read the rest of announcement at LWN.net. In short, this release has several speed improvements, workspace format changed, UI was updated, and several bugs fixed.

Joey Hess “Keeping Your Life in Subversion”

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Joey Hess, a famous Debian hacker, wrote long ago an article about how he was keeping his entire home directory under version control, using CVS. Now, as CVS gets replaced by Subversion, he switched to it, and new article was released. He gives advice on how to split private and public projects, how to keep configuration files under version control, how to use the same home directory on multiple machines. Of course, main advantages of described approach are distributed backups (including inherent mini-backups in form of file copies in the .svn directory); history of your work and configuration changes, including rollback and comparisons; and single synchronized workspace across every machine you’re using. Read more at OnLamp: Joey Hess “Keeping Your Life in Subversion” or at his blog: joey: “Subverting your homedir, or keeping your life in svn” (contains extra links and updates).

Chuck Walrad, Darrel Strom: “The Importance of Branching Models in SCM”

Friday, October 20th, 2006
Chuck Walrad and Darrel Strom wrote an article on what they call “branch-by-purpose” model of branching: “The Importance of Branching Models in SCM”. As for me, this model seems to be the natural choice for branching in presense of multiple parallel development lines and many releases. Unfortunately the article has a couple of weak points. First, it is written in a horrible style of “first we discuss the obvious draw-backs of inadequate solution, never saying that it is actually not recommended; then we finally `discover’ the correct and simple one”. Why waste time? Also, this article is written in somewhat dry and formal manner, but I guess this is pre-requisite for IEEE publication. Nevertheless, this is worth a read, just skip the “Branch-by-release model” and “Build-by-bug-number syndrome” chapters and read them after you finish the rest.

mpatch: new patch and reject merging tool

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
Chris Mason <chris.mason+oracle.com> created a mpatch utility which allows to automatically or interactively apply patches (unified diff and git-style), helping to resolve common cases of patch rejects. Full information and download link is at:
http://oss.oracle.com/~mason/mpatch/ (via LWN)

TortoiseSVN 1.4.0 released

Monday, October 9th, 2006
From: Stefan Küng <tortoisesvn_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2006-09-16 16:45:41 CEST
It’s been almost a year since version 1.3.0 came out, and during that time we have been very busy working on version 1.4.0. And now, we have released TortoiseSVN 1.4.0. The whole user interface of TortoiseSVN got improvements, and there also are a lot of improvements under the hood. The major changes are all mentioned in our release notes: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/tsvn_1.4_releasenotes.html make sure you read them. You can download version 1.4.0 from our download page http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads Enjoy the new version and all the improvements in it :) Stefan
TortoiseSVN homepage is at http://tortoisesvn.net/

Microsoft Codeplex

Sunday, October 8th, 2006
Codeplex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site. It is basically a hosted version of Team Foundation Server which allows project collaboration, providing source control and work item tracking. Full version of Team Foundation Server supports a lot more functionality, such as project communication, product builds, tools integration etc. Team Foundation system is explained in the following documents: Press coverage: I see a lot of projects hosted on Codeplex, but unfortunately I’m not that knowledgeable in modern Microsoft developement landscape, so I have to ask: which especially higher-profile projects are there? What is the general consensus amongst .Net crowd about the Codeplex, and the Team Foundation particularly?

Jeff Atwood: Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe

Saturday, October 7th, 2006
Jeff Atwood in his recent blog post advocates the use of modern source control systems, as opposed to Visual SourceSafe. He provides links to informative lists of Visual SourceSafe flaws and encourages to try out more adequate alternatives, such as Subversion and SourceGear Vault. Critical discussion in comments is rather informative, with several interesting links which I’ll cover later. Read more at: