Eric Anholt ([info]anholt) wrote,
@ 2006-09-15 00:26:00
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Entry tags:freebsd

long time no blog
Huge updates for me. In the last month, we found out our house was going to be put up on the market. Within 3 days, the landlord had accepted an offer, and we had our notice. I had tried to put an offer in, but he accepted another. So, after some fast-paced house-hunting, I found a sweet 4-bedroom place on 53rd and Stark that's newly remodeled (especially the kitchen), has no major issues we've been able to find, a decent back yard with plenty of sun for some gardening, and is still roughly within the neighborhood I wanted to be in. I'm excited, and we're (no, "I'm", I guess) getting keys in less than a week. Incidentally, the offer on this house fell through, and we're all guiltily experiencing some schadenfreude.

Our new housemate is wonderful. She's funny, likes boardgames, is generally clean, and can deal with confrontation in the same way that the rest of this house can't. Plus, she's a prep cook at a nice restaurant, and brings home tasty food. Pretty much your optimal housemate. Even when she was told during the move in process that oh by the way we were probably going to lose the house and have to move in a month, she was cool with that.

Work's been going well. Projects are stacking up, but at least I'm writing open-source driver code like I wanted, and I'm still learning new skills. Recently that was lex and yacc, which I'm ashamed I'd never learned before.

I'm also starting a group to look at converting the FreeBSD repository to git. I've put up a wiki page on the progress, and alexbl and I have been talking about what we should do to come up with a credible proposal. The more I look at git in comparison to hg and svk, the more I'm convinced that it's the right choice not just for xorg but for FreeBSD. Sadly, tonight's conversion experiment failed, and I've got to either fix parsecvs (probably a weekend project, if I had a weekend) or look at the tools that mozilla is using for their conversion. Apparently they're using cvs2svn followed by git-fastimport, taking about 2 hours to convert a repository of comparable size to ports or src.


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[info]betacentauri
2006-09-15 01:50 pm UTC (link)
That's an interesting idea. Why waste the time fixing your own cvs conversion tools when you can just piggyback svn? I guess the only downside is you need a svn setup to bootstrap on. :P Though it might be possible to avoid setting up an actual server.

I've been watching the SCM discussion with interest. Seems to me it's a toss-up between mercurial and git. That said, having never used either, I am in no position to judge. But if you get a freebsd git repository setup, I'd be game for experimenting with it a bit.

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[info]anholt
2006-09-15 04:02 pm UTC (link)
The only question is the quality of cvs2svn's conversion (I'm assuming that once you're out of cvs, you can convert to your heart's content without corruption). Having watched the xorg process, I know that getting correct history out of CVS is quite hard. I 95% trust parsecvs, but haven't seen cvs2svn's output so I don't know if I can trust it. I suppose the only thing to do is try it.

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[info]betacentauri
2006-09-15 10:10 pm UTC (link)
From what I've seen it's decent quality. But I didn't look very hard. I think clkao@ already did a svn conversion of the freebsd repo.

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[info]shelbysomek
2008-07-16 07:53 pm UTC (link)
Games Right now the only thing I need linux to run, thats windows is games. An - ymous (not verified) - Sat, .

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git's advantages
(Anonymous)
2006-09-15 02:41 pm UTC (link)
I would really love to know what you consider git's advantage over its competition.

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Re: git's advantages
[info]hub_
2006-09-15 03:21 pm UTC (link)
compared to SVN and CVS is change tracking beetween branches. It is no doubt a great advantage for distributed development.

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Re: git's advantages
[info]anholt
2006-09-15 04:09 pm UTC (link)
I don't consider SVN an option. It's feature-deprived and slow. I'm unfortunately suffering through another SVN project right now, and it's a daily reminder of why it's not worthwhile. So, in the FreeBSD discussion, I've only talked about svk, since that's the distributed addon. This is really what our deathmatch is about: if we're going to switch, we're going to go distributed, but which one is best?

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: git's advantages
[info]anholt
2006-09-15 04:05 pm UTC (link)
See the wiki page linked in the blog. Most important is "repository structure you can trust".

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[info]hub_
2006-09-15 02:42 pm UTC (link)
so are you moving out or not?

I hate landlords. The last one was a real jackass not to be a liar. Now I'm my own. The only drawback is that moving out will be a bit more complicated now. I guess there should be some disadvantages to counterbalance the advantage of being a home owner. I bit like being you own boss ;-)

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[info]anholt
2006-09-15 04:21 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, we're moving, and I'm bringing this household (4 roommates) with me. The new place is a bit smaller in overall square footage than here, so there'll be some serious consolidation, but it's much nicer than here.

A lot of the stress I've had has been playing out the worst-case scenarios (losing job, having to move for a job, etc.), and making sure my math on my finances is right. The thing is, there hasn't been a case I've come up with yet where this is a bad decision on my part, just some cases where it might not have been optimal. As such, I'm pretty satisfied, when I'm not being irrationally afraid of the commitment.

Complaints about the landlord:
* Never fixed our stove in the last what, 4 months?
* His realtor never gives us 24 hour notice, and chewed us out when we asked for one <24 hour notice to be delayed.
* Gave us 30 days immediately after accepting the offer after 3 days on the market, when he said we would almost surely have until December before anything happened.
* Said at the start of the process that he would offer us some sort of financial compensation for putting us through this... Yeah, that hasn't happened.
* Is trying to sell a house while he has tenants still in it, who are in the process of moving. This is really absurd, and unpleasant for the us to have potential buyers (or realtors) coming in and regularly insulting us.

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[info]hub_
2006-09-15 04:30 pm UTC (link)
My former landlord insulted me. I didn't like it.

Good luck. This is my fourth address in 2 years, and the second city I live in this country. Each and everytime I find that I have far too much crap to move.

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[info]betacentauri
2006-09-15 10:09 pm UTC (link)
That's (one reason) why I bought a house, and $DEITY willing, I won't have to move again for at least ten years.

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[info]hub_
2006-09-16 01:53 am UTC (link)
Actually I want to move back to Montreal, but that is another story.

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[info]betacentauri
2006-09-16 02:00 am UTC (link)
Why are you in Gatineau? Isn't Gatineau a hotbed of French snobs that turn their nose at Ottawa residents across the river? :>

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[info]hub_
2006-09-16 02:42 am UTC (link)
Several reason. Staying in Quebec had some advantage. Houses are cheaper, etc.

But I work in Ottawa proper, and I don't give a fsck to French vs English.

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[info]betacentauri
2006-09-16 03:06 am UTC (link)
Aw, you didn't take the bait. I thought you might, since you apparently grew up in France ("Vive le Quebec libre!" - yes that is an uncouth reference to Charles de Gaulle). :P

I can appreciate the economics, at any rate. I chose to buy my house here because I can't imagine living anywhere else. I'm sure you'd do the same if you lived in Montreal, if that is truly where you'd like to live. Me, personally, if I didn't live in Denver, it'd probably be Zürich, London, or New York City. Maybe Paris or San Francisco. Maybe.

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[info]racheluwaco
2008-07-16 03:29 pm UTC (link)
It took me more than a month, but it's finally here. The existing design is a default I picked until I can tweak something enough to my liking.

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gentoo's git migration
[info]robbat2
2006-09-15 05:52 pm UTC (link)
On migrating to git, shoot an email to antarus@gentoo.org. He's a gentoo developer that got a SoC grant to investigate moving Gentoo from CVS to other version control systems. He developed some modifications to handle some of the larger conversions.

As the CVS admin for Gentoo, my personal bet is on migration to GIT, but there are ways in which it's not quite ready yet (talk to antarus about it).

(Reply to this)

mercurial
(Anonymous)
2006-09-19 02:15 pm UTC (link)
- any comparisons to be made with mercurial?

Olivier Robert made a presentation at BSDCan about Hg:

http://www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/DistributedVCS-paper.pdf
http://www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/DistributedVCS-slides.pdf

home page:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi

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Re: mercurial
(Anonymous)
2006-09-20 01:36 am UTC (link)
Indeed it is quite good. I believe there is a CURRENT repository already in mercurial ....

mercurial may be to git as freebsd is to linux: better but not as widely used :-)

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Re: mercurial
[info]anholt
2006-09-20 05:54 pm UTC (link)
Mercurial's repository structure is nothing I would want to trust my code to. The authors have said they're going to need another flag day before they're satisfied with it. This was a showstopper for us in X, and I think it should be for FreeBSD, too. I'm also not excited about a VCS that doesn't really handle branching within a repo.

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Re: mercurial
(Anonymous)
2006-11-04 07:05 pm UTC (link)
"not excited about a VCS that doesn't really handle branching within a repo" ...

but in mercurial everything is a branch?? just make a new repo :)

What do you mean by:
"Mercurial's repository structure is nothing I would want to trust my code to" ... that it hasn't been stress tested enough?? There's potential for catastrophic data loss? ???

Hopefully the Opensolaris team will help with putting hg through its paces :)

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