Amazon.com Widgets Flotsam and Jetsam #9

Nick Hodges

A man's got to know his limitations

Flotsam and Jetsam #9

By Nick at October 06, 2010 17:13
Filed Under: Flotsam and Jetsam
  • We here at Gateway Ticketing are looking to migrate to a Distributed Version Control System, and so naturally I’m scouring the Internet for information, thoughts, opinions, ideas, etc. (Your thoughts and comments gladly accepted, BTW).  I ran across this document about Mercurial and found a curious thing – per-paragraph comments in the documentation.  Interesting.  People there are making some good comments about each individual paragraph to help improve the document and the book.  Pretty cool.
  • I’m sure that some of you may have an opinion on this particular question at the Programmers StackExchange site. 
  • Are you guys reading Mason Wheeler’s blog?  If you are a Delphi guy, I’d recommend it.  Mason is a really smart guy who likes to stay out on the bleeding edge of what is going on with Delphi, and his blog always makes for an interesting an educational read.  This post is no exception, in which he does a little digging and discusses some things he’s heard and how it might be culminating in native LINQ for Delphi. Exactly the kind of blog post that is fun to read.
  • It’s not often that you see an invention that is so simple and yet so useful that you say “Why didn’t I think of that?”.  Well. here’s one:  The PageKeeper. Ingeniously and fiendishly simple.  Why didn’t I think of that?
  • It is readily apparent to me that the people who make those copier/scanner/fax/printer machines that we all have in our offices now have done a negative amount of usability testing.  That is, these devices are so utterly unapproachable and completely un-figure-out-able that they actually seem to have done some sort of testing that actually made their usability go negative.  Unbelievable how bad the interfaces are.  Seriously.
Comments (9)

Comments (9) -

10/6/2010 5:38:27 PM #

Mason Wheeler

Thanks for the shout-out! Smile

Mason Wheeler United States |

10/6/2010 6:15:11 PM #

Tim Frost

Your Pagekeeper link is mis-spelled, by the way. And there is nothing new under the sun - I have a 50-year-old bookmark which operates on exactly the same principle; there is a picture of a similar one at http://preview.tinyurl.com/24lca8o

Tim Frost United Kingdom |

10/6/2010 6:27:54 PM #

nick

Tim --

Link fixed, thanks.

Nick

nick United States |

10/6/2010 10:30:32 PM #

François

Nick, I believe you've read Joel's take on Distributed Version Control: www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17.html
and his Mercurial tutorial:
www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17.html

François United States |

10/7/2010 2:45:12 AM #

Marcin

Nick,
Lots of interesting things are going to happen to Subversion.
You can check http://subversion.wandisco.com  

Marcin

Marcin Poland |

10/7/2010 12:58:48 PM #

Rossen Assenov

You can try this : http://bitbucket.org/

Bitbucket is a free code hosting site for the popular Mercurial distributed version control system (DVCS) with over 60,000 users.

We're happy to announce that Bitbucket has been acquired by Atlassian.

Rossen Assenov United States |

10/7/2010 5:53:08 PM #

Craig

I've been testing out both Mercurial and Git for a couple of small Delphi related open source projects I'm working on.  One of them is hosted on google code (using Mercurial), and the other is on github.  Part of the exercise is to evaluate them for the project I'm currently working on (which has teams in several states).

So far, I'd say git support on Windows isn't great.  It works, but if your programmers don't have experience with a unix shell, they'll probably struggle.  Mercurial is definitely ahead there.

But strangely, I found it easier to talk to github through our authenticated proxy.  I gave up on getting Mercurial to do that, but the mysysgit implementation actually made it easier for me.

Craig Australia |

10/8/2010 2:32:24 PM #

Kyle Miller

Converting my Subversion repositories to Mercurial is a possibility. Mercurial is addressing a need. I will wait to see what the Subversion guys have for 1.7. I don't see why a Mercurial-like operating mode in Subversion wouldn't be possible.

Kyle Miller United States |

10/14/2010 8:33:51 PM #

Warren Postma

Mercurial is great. Beware the temptation to convert a large subversion repository hosting multiple projects to a single mercurial repository. The entire concept of what should be in a repository is different.  Mercurial projects containing everything you need to build one major app, or a group of apps that share mostly the same source code, or which all need to be checked out together should be a repository.

A mercurial repository can be grabbed in whole (entire!) only, and you can not "check out" part of a repository. People who are used to "views" in perforce, and "partial checkouts of one or several folders" from a subversion repository will not find the same feature in Mercurial.

Also, beware that conversion is better than a massive commit that inorganically adds 10,000 files in a single commit, while building your repositories.  Do small checkins even when doing your initial checkin, or you will regret it later.

Read up on mercurial at www.hginit.com before you switch.  I love using Delphi with Mercurial.  It beats everything else out there.

Warren

Warren Postma Canada |

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