I really need to get the laptop set up the rest of the way, since it doesn't have an air modem or anything, and Wichita is not well set up when it comes to wireless (at least in the places I tend to hang out lately: medical waiting rooms, mostly).
This means learning git (to the dismay of my sysadmin/husband, who prefers... um... two other packages I can't remember, though he admits git is probably better than TWiki, which I've threatened to use), filling in some of my massive blind spots in Unix (to much reduce the dismay of my sysadmin/husband, who is perpetually going "You don't know how to use FOO?" forgetting that my Unix knowledge is sometimes deep but very, very narrow), and updating Postgres, exim, Apache, and Perl and whatever else I happen to think of.
Then I just need to get a USB-enabled M-type keyboard, and I can use the laptop exclusively....
Re:Good times for VCS'
wirebird on 2008-02-10T15:19:23
Subversion and Mercurial sound about right for the suggestions he made. I think he uses Mercurial at the day job, and used to use subversion, and only objects to git as being something different he has to deal with. For simplicity, he likes to keep home and work using the same stuff wherever it makes sense to do so. (I can appreciate that... having worked a contract job in Delphi and a FOSS project in Perl for a year or two.)
Re:Good times for VCS'
Aristotle on 2008-02-10T20:04:45
Git and Mercurial are actually pretty similar in use. In a surprising number of cases, the command to do something is called the same in both of them. And if he’s ever touching any free software repositories, he’ll have to learn at least a minimum of git sooner or later anyway.
:-) Re:Good times for VCS'
wirebird on 2008-02-10T20:09:33
Oh, his complaint isn't about *using* any of them, it's about maintaining them on our servers. Particularly, maintaining more than one... likes to keep his package management stuff to a minimum, as one might expect.
Re:Good times for VCS'
Aristotle on 2008-02-10T20:00:57
Actually, for all its primitivity, SCCS wasn’t on the wrong track, at least according to the information I could find about how it worked.
Even RCS is OK for single-user tracking of a handful of files in one directory. That may not sound like much – but it gets two things right: local repository instead of a server; and zero overhead for setting up a repository (not even a
foo init). If someone wrote decent merging and push/pull support for it, it would actually not be bad at all.CVS is where things really went off the rails, by using RCS as its underlying model, accepting almost all its limitations with a shrug, and then breaking all the things that RCS did get right. Instead of addressing collaboration and experimentation by providing merging and push/pull, it tried to do so by going totally into the weeds. CVS is pretty much wrong in every possible way.
Subversion is better than CVS in the sense that it fixes the limitations that CVS inherited from RCS. However, it does nothing to address the flawed premises that CVS was based on; on top of that, both of its physical repo formats are worse than CVS’s (quite a feat!).
As for the DVCS alternatives: I don’t consider them all equally good choices. There are only two that have the right model of version control – git and Mercurial. Of the two, git has a much better technical basis. All others are based on partially flawed premises – although certainly they’re all far and away better than the CVS/Svn model.
Re:Good times for VCS'
Dom2 on 2008-02-10T22:04:21
Well, if you really want to investigate SCCS, you could poke at CSSC.:-) Actually, OpenSolaris probably has a copy of the originals, but I can't find it after a quick look.
Re:Good times for VCS'
Aristotle on 2008-02-10T22:18:12
I saw that before. I’d be interested in a short conceptual overview of the SCCS model, but not interested enough to put in the effort to deduce that from the software.
:-) Re:Good times for VCS'
chromatic on 2008-02-12T05:32:30
If I understand correctly, SCCS was one of the major inspirations for BitKeeper, as it was a major part of TeamWare.
Re:Good times for VCS'
Aristotle on 2008-02-12T08:02:30
Yeah; this is the sort of fragmentary hint about SCCS of which I’ve picked up a couple, which lead me to say that my understanding is it was decent, if comparatively primitive. But I can’t say any more than that since I haven’t seen any substantial exposition of how it worked.
