De-normalizing dissent

I really hadn’t been planning to comment on the Duck Dynasty brouhaha. But conservative gadfly Mark Steyn (a very funny, witty man even if you disagree with his politics) has described the actual strategy of GLAAD and its allies with a pithy phrase that I think describes wider circulation – “de-normalizing dissent”. OK, let’s get… Continue reading De-normalizing dissent

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Announcing cvssync, with thoughts on “good enough”

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.

How to demolish your software project with style

I did something unusual today. I pulled the plug on one of my own projects. In Solving the CVS-lifting problem and Announcing cvs-fast-export I described how I accidentally ended up maintaining two different CVS-to-something-else exporters. I finally got enough round tuits to put together two-thirds of the head-to-head comparison I’ve been meaning to do –… Continue reading How to demolish your software project with style

Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating!

A few days ago I released reposurgeon 2.43. Since then I’ve been finishing up yet another conversion of an ancient repository – groff, this time, from CVS to git at the maintainer’s request. In the process, some ugly features and irregularities in the reposurgeon command language annoyed me enough that I began fixing them. This,… Continue reading Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating!

Reposurgeon Battles All Monsters!

Though there haven’t been any huge dramatic improvements since Subversion analysis got good enough to use even on horribly gnarly repositories, reposurgeon continues to quietly get better and faster. I shipped 2.43 a few minutes ago.