Who are the programmers who are famous for doing programmer things? I’m wondering about this because my wife Cathy asked me a simple question last night, and I realized I didn’t have an answer to it. “Are you” she asked “the most famous programmer in the world?”
Category: Software
On open-source pharma
(This copies a comment I left on Derek Lowe’s blog at Science Magazine.) I was the foundational theorist of open-source software development back in the 1990s, and have received a request to respond to your post on open-source pharma. Is there misplaced idealism and a certain amount of wishful thinking in the open-source pharma movement?… Continue reading On open-source pharma
Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved
A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I… Continue reading Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved
debubble – a tool for popping pointless merge bubbles
If you hate pointless merge bubbles as much as I do, you’ll kick yourself because you didn’t think of this. But don’t feel bad. I should have, a lot sooner, myself. Voila! git-debubble.
How to submit a drive-by patch and get it accepted
I think it’s weird that I have to write this post in 2015, but earlier today I had to explain to someone with the technical skills to submit a good patch that he was doing the process wrong in some basic and extremely annoying ways. Googling revealed that most explanations of patch etiquette are rather… Continue reading How to submit a drive-by patch and get it accepted
How to spot a high-quality repository conversion
In my last post, I inveighed against using git-svn to do whole-repository conversions from Subversion to git (as opposed to its intended use, which is working a Subversion repository live through a git remote). Now comes the word that hundreds of projects a week seem to be fleeing SourceForge because of their evil we’ll-hijack-your-repo-and-crapwarify-your installer… Continue reading How to spot a high-quality repository conversion
Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!
This is a public-service warning. It has come to my attention that some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. Reminder: I am speaking as an expert, having done numerous… Continue reading Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!
Zeno tarpits
There’s a deeply annoying class of phenomena which, if you write code for any length of time, you will inevitably encounter. I have found it to be particularly prevalent in transformations to clean up or canonicalize large, complex data sets; repository export tools hit variants of it all the time, and so does my doclifter… Continue reading Zeno tarpits
A belated response to “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar “
Back in 2012, Poul-Henning-Kamp wrote a disgruntled article in ACM Queue, A Generation Lost in the Bazaar. javporn It did not occur to me to respond in public at the time, but someone else’s comment on a G+ thread about the article revived the thread. Rereading my reaction, I think it is still worth sharing… Continue reading A belated response to “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar “
My Gitorious projects have moved.
Gitorious – which I preferred to GitHub for being totally open-source – is shutting down sometime in May. I had no fewer than 26 projects on there, including reposurgeon, cvs-fast-import, doclifter, and INTERCAL. Now they’ve moved. This won’t affect most of my users, as the web pages and distribution tarballs are still in their accustomed… Continue reading My Gitorious projects have moved.
Why I won’t mourn Mozilla
An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status, says Computerworld, and reports their user market share at 10% and dropping. It doesn’t look good for the Mozilla Foundation – especially not with so much of their funding coming from Google which of course has its own browser to push. I wish I could feel sadder… Continue reading Why I won’t mourn Mozilla
GPSD 3.12 has shipped – bulletproofed from below
I’ve been radio silent the last couple of weeks mainly because I’ve been concentrating furiously on getting a GPSD release out the door. This one is a little more noteworthy than usual because it may actually have fixed a well-hidden flaw or vulnerability of some significance. Regular readers may recall from back in 2013 that… Continue reading GPSD 3.12 has shipped – bulletproofed from below
Progress towards the extinction of CVS
The Great Beast, designed for converting large CVS repos, is now in full production. It hasn’t killed off any specimens in the wild yet (and I’ll explain why in a bit), but it’s doing spectacularly well on our test repositories. As a representative large example, the entire Emacs CVS history, 1985-2009, 113309 CVS commits, lifts… Continue reading Progress towards the extinction of CVS
How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2
How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2, with a new section on being original. Incorporates more feedback from here and G++ For those of you who wondered why this didn’t just become a major section in How To Become A Hacker, it’s because I think it might become long enough to make that document too bulky… Continue reading How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2
SRC 0.9: Ready for the less adventurous now
I just shipped SRC 0.9, and you no longer need to be adventurous to try it. It has a regression-test suite and real users. Remarkably, SRC has had real users since 0.3, two days after it was born. Even more remarkably, the count of crash reports and botched operations from those users is zero. Zero.… Continue reading SRC 0.9: Ready for the less adventurous now
Emacs git conversion is done
Finally. After ten months of work, it’s done. Emacs is fully converted to git. You can clone from git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git and if you have commit rights you can push to it and the changes will stick. The bzr repo is still up but only as an archive.
I wrote a version-control system today
I wrote a version-control system today. Yes, an entire VCS. Took me 14 hours. Yeah, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. “Why,” you ask, quite reasonably, “would you want to do a thing like that? We’re not short of powerful VCSes these days. That is true. But I got to thinking, early this morning,… Continue reading I wrote a version-control system today
Chipping away at CVS
I’ve just shipped a new version of cvs-fast-export, 1.26. It speeds the tool up more, more, more – cranking through 25 years and 113300 commits of Emacs CVS history, for example in 2:48. That’s 672 commits a second, for those of you in the cheap seats. But the real news this time is a Python… Continue reading Chipping away at CVS
Moving the NetBSD repository
Some people on the NetBSD tech-repository list have wondered why I’ve been working on a full NetBSD repository conversion without a formal request from NetBSD’s maintainers that I do so. It’s a fair question. An answer to it involves both historical contingency and some general issues about moving and mirroring large repositories. Because of the… Continue reading Moving the NetBSD repository
Proving the Great Beast concept
Wendell Wilson over at TekSyndicate had a good idea – run the NetBSD repo conversion on a machine roughly comparable to the Great Beast design. The objective was (a) to find out if it freakin’ worked, and (b) to get a handle on expected conversion time and maximum working set for a really large conversion.… Continue reading Proving the Great Beast concept