Category: New on my website

I just shipped version 1.10 of cvs-fast-export with a new feature: it now emits fast-import files that contain CVS’s default ignore patterns. This is a request for help from people who know CVS better than I do.

Here’s a late New Year’s gift for all you repository-editing fiends out there: the long-awaited and perhaps long-dreaded reposurgeon 3.0. In Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating! I described the downside of a strategy of incremental small language changes aimed at preserving compatibility: you can wind up trapped by suboptimal early decisions. Sometimes, you have… Continue reading Reposturgeon and Santa Claus Against The Martians!

My first gift of the new year. Read it here.

Not long ago I pulled the plug on one of the two CVS export utilities I was maintaining. One consequence of this is that I decided I needed to get the other one out of beta and into a state I would be willing to ship as 1.0. And lo, it has come to pass.… Continue reading Announcing cvs-fast-export 1.0

There’s an ancient Unix maxim to the effect that a tool that gets 85% of your job done now is preferable to one that gets 100% done never. Sometimes chasing corner cases is more work than the problem really justifies. In today’s dharma lesson, I shall illustrate this principle with a real-world and useful example.

If you’re a regular at A&D or on my G+ feed, and even possibly if you aren’t, you’ll have noticed that I ship an awful lot of code. I do get questions about this; between GPSD, reposurgeon, giflib, doclifter, and bimpty-bump other projects it is reasonable that other hackers sometimes wonder how I do it.… Continue reading shipper is about to go 1.0 – reviewers requested

OK, this is embarrassing. I got a Mercurial command wrong in 1.11 – thanks to A&D regular Jay Maynard for pointing out the error. But I landed another minor feature. So there.

Yes, I know I shipped a point release of this yesterday. Then some new features landed as a direct result of that release. Mainly, smart defaults for user name and ID, and repo support for hg/bzr/svn. Also (cosmetic addition) the project now has a logo. Code here.

coverity-submit automates the process of running the Coverity static checker’s front-end tools and shipping the results to their public server for analysis. One bug fix, two minor features. The build-version (-b) and description (-t) options now have sensible defaults. When run from a repository, the default for -b is the commit ID of the head… Continue reading coverity-submit 1.10 is released

There’s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore/expand/exploit/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion. Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games? It was Walter Bright’s game “Empire”… Continue reading vms-empire 1.10 released

For those of you who have been following my work on tools to muck out the swamp that is CVS, a new shovel: cvs-fast-export. Note, this is an alpha release for testing purposes; double-check the quality of any conversions you do with it carefully.

The 2.13 release of reposurgeon has in it maybe the coolest new feature I’ve ever implemented in five minutes of programming – graphical visualization of a repository’s commit DAG.

Well, er, no. Actually, it attacks CVS. Yes, that’s right, the just-shipped reposurgeon 2.11 can now read – though not write – CVS repositories. To get it to do this, I got my lunch-hooks on a relatively old program called cvsps that assembles changesets out of CVS repositories for human inspection. I gave it a… Continue reading Reposturgeon Attacks Tokyo!

Well-designed software suites should not only be correct, they should be able to demonstrate their own correctness. This is why the new 2.10 release of reposurgeon features a new tool called ‘repodiffer’. And yes, that is what it sounds like – a diff tool that operates not on files but entire repository histories. You get… Continue reading The Reposturgeon That Ate Sheboygan!