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.

There's this great property called System.Environment.UserInteractive in .NET that tells you if the application was executed interactively. This is a great opportunity to decide where to dump the output of your application. If it's true, spew to System.Console. If it's false, write to a file or, in the case of Windows, to the beautiful, beautiful Event Log, available via System.Diagnostics.EventLog, even -- no work necessary!

I think I was talking about this sort of thing before.

This paper is killing me. Well, not this paper itself, although it's rather suspect. The thing that is killing me is the inane commentary regarding the paper.

"one, two, many," of course reminded me of Pratchett. Maybe if we freeze them, they'll start doing higher math.

  Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:02:13 +0200
  From: Firstname Lastname <blah@example.com>
  To: mozart-users@ps.uni-sb.de
  Subject: new to programming

  Hi

  I am new to programming.
  I want to learn oz. So how do I best begin, I have no programming experience.

  Thanks in advance

  Firstname Lastname

What I want to know, how did someone with no programming experience

1. find the Oz list, and
2. decide that "the Oz language, which supports declarative programming, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency as part of a coherent whole," was the first language they should learn?

(lisp)

I read an article about autoboxing surprises in Java 1.5/5/V/quinquies/five-o a week or two ago (that link is a repeat that came up when I googled), and noticed a few links back to the conversation in lambda or whatever.

I read the following from the regexp2 module for ACL.

• The new matcher uses Perl syntax, and is nearly feature compatible with Perl. Only a few obscure features have not been implemented.
• Speed: the new matcher was designed to be fast. On the CL-PPCRE test suite (with 1600+ tests) it is on average 30% faster than Perl.

Of course, the smartarse in me immediately responds,"What, the useful few obscure features?" I think every regexp feature in Perl can be called "obscure" by some party.