http://www.placenet.org/benoit/index.php/ fr Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:26:39 +0200 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Dotclear http://www.placenet.org/benoit/index.php/post/2007/06/21/free-software-needs-distributed-control-system urn:md5:404aad8a47881720081bf15367877813 Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:39:00 +0200 Benoît Dejean awffullgitgnomememorymonotone <p>I have a commit access to GNOME svn, so i'm able to do whatever i want with my code, and then commit it. My main free software contribution has been GNOME for a long time.<br /> I've recently started to hack on <a href="http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull">awffull</a> (log analyser, it's a webalizer fork, but webalizer is dead). I keep submitting patches on the mailing lists, i'm mainly interested in memory usage, which is a real issue with huge logs, and even more on 32bits (allocating more than 2GiB is risky). One of my patch provides a 7% memory usage improvement by using flexible arrays : this saves millions of malloc calls so heap admin / malloc overhead is much lower.<br /> <br /> But, even if Steve (upstream) and the mailing list people are great and very responsive, my patches have not been merged yet. I totally understand why they are not already merged, but i have no way to provide my <em>branch</em> to other awffull fans. So i started stacking everything in a local git repository. But now I need again and again to resplit the patches because upstream just can't merge my changes. I now realize how much we need distributed control system (git, monotone, etc). Without it, patches get lost on mailing lists, they get obsolete, they don't apply anymore ... a big waste of work.<br /> <br /> With a distributed control system, upstream is able to pull from contributors, merge or cherrypick.<br /> <br /> I'm frustrated about awffull, i now better understand how people could be frustrated about GNOME.<br /> I am sorry for everyone (hackers, packagers, etc) who work hard on free software but are unable to (easily) get their job upstream because of the stupid VCS we are still using.<br /></p> http://www.placenet.org/benoit/index.php/post/2007/06/03/git-merge-vs-git-log urn:md5:07c915f4449fbf9d37b209bd5016b6bf Sun, 03 Jun 2007 22:59:00 +0200 Benoît Dejean GNOME gitgnomemonotonesubversion <p>I no longer use svn directly for libgtop and system-monitor. I use git-svn instead. I no longer write ChangeLog. But i should because git-merge doesn't seem to preserve revision log. So dear lazy web, how i get the revision log of a branch including all revisions logs comming from merges ? Will it survive branch deletion. <a href="http://www.monotone.ca">monotone propagate</a> can do this but doesn't have a mtn-svn yet :/</p>