reesesWeb

I thought my solution to the problem of Subversion branching was sufficiently insipid, brittle, inane, and absurd to be unique.

Oh, how I was wrong. It is precisely the prescribed solution according to the Subversion FAQ. That does vindicate me, though, in asserting that my solution was moronic, at least. If the manual, source code, or FAQ agrees, then it must be stupid and wrong.

I have given up at this point. I'm going to convert a raft of scripts into a single application (similar to svk) that just uses Subversion as a storage and data access layer, kind of like MySQL using BDB. I'm entirely too tempted to call it "Perversion", but that's low-hanging fruit.

Sometimes it's good to think twice, but those who know me know I just consider that a waste of time. Measure once, cut thirty times, that's my motto.

I was pondering the Subversion problem I was having last week, and realized that I could solve the problem with some disgusting and brittle hackery.

According to the doco, Subversion repository copies are very inexpensive, basically being copy-on-write links, like those short-lived CD-based overlay filesystems.¹ Tags, therefore, were especially lightweight, with an O(n) disk footprint based on the number of files in the "tag". Remember, these aren't tags, but rather, someone's answer to "How would we implement tags if we only had a filesystem?" It's the equivalent of a symbolic link farm, but more efficient.

I have finally come to the conclusion that Subversion is evil, and a general step backwards in software configuration management.

I had the same opinion prior to using it, but now, after a week of dorking with it, I can say it has lived up to its goal of being a better cvs than cvs. That can be compared to a goal of being a better Titanic than the Titanic.

I am very branch happy, and this is where I started itching with Subversion before I even dug into the manual. cvs is not renowned for being friendly with people who like branches, and I've spent a lot of time faking branches with tags in cvs.

I went to look at the new MacBook today at the Apple store. I feel this desire to replace both my G4 PowerBooks with another Macintosh laptop.

Now that I've validated its functionality, I'm ready to migrate the Mac Mini to be a home theater pc, and I miss the dual screen functionality afforded by having a laptop with screen-spanning ability.

That said, the MacBook non-Pro will not be replacing anything at my house any time soon.

The good:

• The keyboard is much nicer than it looks. I expected a Mattel Aquarius experience, but it types almost as well as my PowerBooks. It took about three femtoseconds to adjust.

Others will cover the newsy bits better, but I rather enjoyed watching the fireworks from our lower deck, although a fair bit of the show was obstructed by a crane, I-80, and a couple buildings. More than made up for by spending the time with my parents and not "hundreds of thousands" of strangers who were there, according to the television news broadcast.

I took a bunch of shots with the exposure on my junk camera (SD400) lengthened somewhat, and the happy-smiley faces turned into something...less.

I have some .dfont files I wanted to convert into true type (ttf) files. .dfont files are peculiar to the Mac, and peculiar to Mac OS X, which seems kind of strange, because they're data-fork true type font files.

This had to have been the most painful web/db/php-based software upgrade ever.

$ cp drupal/sites/default/settings.php .
$ tar zxf drupal-4.7.0.tar.gz
$ cd drupal-4.7.0
$ cp -r * ../drupal
$ cp ../settings.php ../drupal/sites/default

And then, I had to hit update.php. Sheesh.