A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, ...). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository).

Continue reading →

If it wasn't clear by now, I'm pretty addicted to RSS. Some people disagree, and see RSS as evil because of the extra traffic that active polling of the feeds introduces. To me, it's the easiest way of publishing news, anyone can set up a feed on about any host, and because of the polling nature it allows for easier scripting than other solutions. Besides, with web-based solutions like Google Reader, the extra traffic can be shared across many users anyway. The only frustration I am left with is that not every webpage or software package that interests me has an RSS feed. I wrote AtoMail to have an RSS feed of projects (or webpages) that have mailinglists instead of RSS feeds. In addition to this script, I just released a script called SVNFeed, which I use to monitor Subversion activity of projects that don't have an RSS-enabled Subversion Web interface. By monitoring the tags dir of a project, I can even get a more coarse grained granularity of updates, mostly up to the release. Both scripts might be consolidated in the future, possibly together with even more RSS generation scripts I have lying around ;-)

As many of you know, Psi has been using Darcs for version controlling since the development of 0.10. However, although Darcs works on most platforms, some people have been experiencing problems with getting Darcs to work for them. Because of this, and some other inconveniences (not being able to checkout subdirectories of the development tree, long checkout times, the lack of a scalable web-interface, ...), we have decided to create a Subversion mirror our development repository (using Tailor).

Continue reading →