reesesWeb

Challenge by Moss on September 13, 4:25

It's interesting--I've thought for a while that it would be cool for Ruby to steal some of Lisp's more advanced features. Ruby has a way of taking esoteric computer science techniques and making them deliciously readable and easy to use, so I'd love to see a Rubyish implementation of, say, macros. But I never could have guessed that we'd come so far so quickly in implementing the most important Lisp feature of all: violently defensive community resistance to even the mildest criticism! Now that's innovation!

I thought my solution to the problem of Subversion branching was sufficiently insipid, brittle, inane, and absurd to be unique.

Oh, how I was wrong. It is precisely the prescribed solution according to the Subversion FAQ. That does vindicate me, though, in asserting that my solution was moronic, at least. If the manual, source code, or FAQ agrees, then it must be stupid and wrong.

I have given up at this point. I'm going to convert a raft of scripts into a single application (similar to svk) that just uses Subversion as a storage and data access layer, kind of like MySQL using BDB. I'm entirely too tempted to call it "Perversion", but that's low-hanging fruit.

Sometimes it's good to think twice, but those who know me know I just consider that a waste of time. Measure once, cut thirty times, that's my motto.

I was pondering the Subversion problem I was having last week, and realized that I could solve the problem with some disgusting and brittle hackery.

According to the doco, Subversion repository copies are very inexpensive, basically being copy-on-write links, like those short-lived CD-based overlay filesystems.¹ Tags, therefore, were especially lightweight, with an O(n) disk footprint based on the number of files in the "tag". Remember, these aren't tags, but rather, someone's answer to "How would we implement tags if we only had a filesystem?" It's the equivalent of a symbolic link farm, but more efficient.

I have finally come to the conclusion that Subversion is evil, and a general step backwards in software configuration management.

I had the same opinion prior to using it, but now, after a week of dorking with it, I can say it has lived up to its goal of being a better cvs than cvs. That can be compared to a goal of being a better Titanic than the Titanic.

I am very branch happy, and this is where I started itching with Subversion before I even dug into the manual. cvs is not renowned for being friendly with people who like branches, and I've spent a lot of time faking branches with tags in cvs.

There's this great property called System.Environment.UserInteractive in .NET that tells you if the application was executed interactively. This is a great opportunity to decide where to dump the output of your application. If it's true, spew to System.Console. If it's false, write to a file or, in the case of Windows, to the beautiful, beautiful Event Log, available via System.Diagnostics.EventLog, even -- no work necessary!