Tag: version control

GNU Arch – first impressions

Something really strange happened today. I never thought that this is possible, even less that it could happen to me, but it did. CVS did something really strange to my Intranet/Webcentral repository. All the code is there, but there is no more diffirentiation between versions. Whatever you try to see, you get all the code at once. Yuck!

That happened probably because I was waiting for something like this to happen. Not like this, but, well, whatever. I’ve been constantly irritated with CVS recently. Maybe I am using it wrong, maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job, maybe something else. Anyway, I switched to using arch. It seems to be better then CVS in certain areas, so I decided to give it a shot.

Here are the first impressions:

  • No RPM found in standard places like FreshRPMs and RPMfind.net. Maybe they are there, but I was not looking hard enough.
  • Building from source is simple, but two things I hate: 1. Files like INSTALL and README start with a “=” sign. “=README” and “=INSTALL” is something that disturbes me. :) 2. configure didn’t want to start in the same directory I got after extracting the .tar.gz . I had to make another one and start configure from there. Messy.
  • Organization of archives, projects, branches and versions is much cleaner then in CVS.
  • Resource like CVS Home is either missing or not easy/fast to find. Again, I was not looking hard enough just yet.
  • Generation of GNU Changelogs is sweet.
  • …so are the patchset, although until now I just like the idea, but have no practice. I can see that it’s possible, just haven’t got myself that far yet.
  • Distributed repositories and ease of setting one up using http/ftp/sft/etc blows my imagination. Simpliest so far. Mine is over sftp. :)

I’ll be writing more code in all the different place for the next few days, I guess.

CVS and bugtracking with Mantis

All the small things to close working week. Rest of the day I’ve spent education myself on CVS again. :) I’ve came across CVS book at red-bean.com which I now want to order hardcopy. All my today CVS practise was around a wonderful piece of software called Mantis. It is simple yet powerfull bugtracking system, which I have adopted as technical support tool for our company. All of my changes were based on version 0.16.0, while mantis went to version 0.17.0. So, I’ve been porting all my changes to the new version. Tried both ways with traditional diff-edit-patch-repeat and cvs ways. So far, I enjoy the cvs way of doing things, and I haven’t yet tried branching and merging. Oh, I sound like a developer, don’t I? :)

Java, CVS, and documentation

Last few days were pretty active. First of all, I was playing with apache, JBoss and resin setup. I managed to get them to work together, although failed to make resin handle web apps from the /.

I also spent a fair amount of time on CVS, mutt+gnupg, CA with openssl and some other stuff. CVS makes me happy. I’ve read about some BSD application called arch, which is supposed to be even better then CVS, though the port for Linux is not complete yet, so be it :) Mutt was pretty easy to set up with gnupg. Actually, it happened so, that I had pgp support compiled in for ages, and gpg.rc configuration file was kindly provided with the distribution of mutt package.

Now I am about to write several technical documents for our company internal use, so I was looking for the right way to do it. Office suits were not even thought of, after I remembered my Final Year Project preparation in MS Office. Yuck, that was a pain in the … Hmm.. Mkay. So, I went off to the direction of XML and SGML, but that land is a bit confusing. DocBook followed with recomendations from Linux Documentaion Project (aka LDP). All roads lead to Rome, though and I ended up with TeX idea in my head. I will live it through over the weekend and I will decide finally what to use.

Slay – user process killer and CVS

Came over a nice program called Slay which does the following:

Slay sends given signal (KILL by default) to all processes belonging to user(s) given on the command line.

I was also playing a bit with CVS GUIs today. There are some programs out there. WinCVS.org was particularly helpful. For CVS itself, I found www.cvshome.org to be the most helpful resource.