Lars Wirzenius: August, 2005
Contents
- August 26: Piuparts development using Bzr
- August 15: Two bits
- August 10: Xchat whiteout
Friday, August 26, 2005
Debian: Piuparts development using Bzr
Now that my vacation is over and various crises have been dealt with, I've started working again on piuparts, my package installation, upgrading, and removal tester for Debian. I want to make it easier for other people to contribute to this. So far, I've used CVS for version control, with CVSROOT being on my laptop. My laptop is my main development machine, and I need to be able to work with it in off-line mode. For the CVS/Subversion style of version control, this means having the repository on my laptop, but that makes it hard for other people to use it. (I know Subversion can do some things off-line, but it's not good enough.)
I've looked at several of the new-fangled distributed version control systems in the past months, and I've decided to have a dab at using Bazaar-NG (bzr). It's in development, and nowhere near as mature as, say, Bazaar or Darcs, but where those rub me the wrong way, Bzr seems sensible. We'll see.
Thus, if anyone wants to follow Piuparts development, and make patches, they can follow my development at http://liw.iki.fi/liw/bzr/piuparts. I'm quite new to this whole thing, but here's the basic instructions to work with this:
- To "check out" (using CVS terminology), you create
your own "branch" (using Bzr terminology):
"
bzr branch http://liw.iki.fi/liw/bzr/piuparts". This creates a directorypiupartsunder your working directory. - To fetch any new changes I've made, go into the
piupartsdirectory and say: "bzr pull". This works as long as you don't make any changes of your own. - If you make any changes of your own, do this
instead: "
bzr merge http://liw.iki.fi/liw/bzr/piuparts". This will merge my changes with your changes, in ways that are mysterious to me, but I'm hoping it'll just work, or at least work well enough when compared to CVS.
Given the in-development nature of Bzr, you may need to use a newer version than what is currently packaged for Debian. Sorry about that. I will, however, make frequent tarballs to work around problems and also to allow participation without having to use yet another version control system.
If you want to send me changes, mail me patches (unified
diffs, "bzr diff" does the right thing) or a
URL for your Bzr branch.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Rant: Two bits
"Two bits" is 25 cents, not 2 cents. See Wikipedia for the full story.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Random hacks: Xchat whiteout
I have long been reluctant to use /ignore
on IRC. I do not have a moral problem with ignoring unpleasant
people, but I do have a practical problem: it can be confusing
to see only responses to the ignored person and it is not
always clear from context that they are responses. To reduce
this confusion, it would be better if what the ignored person
writes is shown with the same foreground and background
color. I'm told irssi can do this already, but I like xchat
and I don't want to switch, so I wrote
a
whiteout plugin. I've only just started to use it, so
it may well be buggy.